Ruined time and post-revolutionary allegory in Nthikeng Mohlele’s Small Things

Abstract

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.”