Judging New 'South African' Fiction in the Transnational Moment‪.‬

The end of 'South African' literary historiography? A few years ago, I asked the question, "Does [English] South African Literature Still Exist?" (2005) in a keynote address for a Wits University colloquium dealing with the contested terrain we used to call 'South African literature' (often eliding the crucial qualifier, 'English'). Whether we can or should still talk about 'SA English Literature', and whether it does or should continue to exist is partly the subject of this essay. In the Wits address, I suggested that 'South African' literature in English, in the (60s Dennis Brutus) 'Knuckles Fists Boots' mode, or in the (70s Andre Brink) 'Looking on Darkness' moment, was dead, and that I was glad of it. In the same way that Es'kia Mphahlele (1959: 199) declaimed in the late 1950s against the kind of (South African) writing composed at "white heat, everything full of vitriol", confessing to his exhaustion with it, my reading was that a feeling of 'enough' with landlocked, 'vitriol' writing had become widespread, even among the adherents of 'SA Lit'. In its wake, a phenomenon one might call (assuming 'English' as implicit) 'Literature out of South Africa'--writing emanating from the country and written after a decisive transnational rupture --had arisen in defiance of, or in a state of indifference to, the codes and conformities of the earlier historical-political emphases in the country's corpus of writing. This newer writing was no longer necessarily held within the seam of intercultural convergence, no longer always seeking to flatten out the ridge of that seam yet leaving in its wake the mark of that suture. (1) A couple of years later I asked the rhetorical question whether many of us who had previously regarded ourselves as scholars of South African English Literature had not now become, or wanted to become--in the wake of the poststructuralist turn and the death of the author as a revered figure--academic 'rock stars' in our own right, more interested in writing in our names on any number of sexy topics (cities, oceanic discourse, jazz, metropolitanisms, whiteness studies, ugly/beautiful aesthetics, self-styling, to name a few) than in the more modest tasks of assessing, describing and evaluating the writings of others demarcated as 'imaginative SA writers'. I warned, however, that a more broadly cultural imaginary, out of which the newer forms of critical writing necessarily emerged, depended on the continued existence of a literary-imaginative archive, and that if we failed to record and assess the newer writers and their works, even the broader cultural imaginary could well become etiolated (De Kock 2008a).