Browsing by Subject "Post-apartheid literature"

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Open Access
A formalist in the trenches: Graham K. Riach’s The Short Story After Apartheid
(Routledge, 2024-09-03) Wright, Timothy Sean
This essay offers a brief assessment of the potential of a formalist approach to the criticism of South African literature. Examining Graham K. Riach's recent study The Short Story After Apartheid, it suggests that the "New Formalism" Riach employs provides an innovative mode of criticism that sees the literary text as interactive with its context rather than as a space of passive representation. Viewing the literary text as a spur to insight allows for a creative engagement with and vivification of many of the sedimented categories of South African critical thought. The essay expresses misgivings, however, about, first, the possibility of harnessing this mode of reading to a determinate political end, and second, its general bias toward the conceptual aspects of literary experience over and against the affective.
Open Access
Ruined time and post-revolutionary allegory in Nthikeng Mohlele’s Small Things
(Centre for African Studies, 2019) Wright, Timothy Sean
This paper reads Nthikeng Mohlele’s 2013 novel Small Things with a view to understanding a qualitative shift in South Africa’s post-apartheid historical consciousness: an emergent sense of being in “exile from history.” This is not simply a relationship to history of being “post,” but rather a melancholic attachment that cannot be fully relinquished. I use this lens to understand the dark satire of Mohlele’s novel of Johannesburg flânerie and unrequited yearning, a narrative which seems to foreclose the forms of generative encounter so central to urban aesthetics in post-apartheid South Africa. My aim in this article is to distinguish the political desires in this novel both from the revolutionary energies and imaginaries of the liberation struggle, as well as from more recent and optimistic work on urbanism or the energies of the various fallist movements. By contrast to these, Mohlele’s novel suggests that liberation might take traumatic and melancholic forms. I argue that this is not post- or anti-political literature, nor a literature of disillusionment, but rather the negotiation of a new relationship with political time that allows the post-apartheid subject to maintain an increasingly tenuous relationship with what David Scott calls the “allegory of emancipationist redemption.”