Academic Work
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My PhD research on South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission focused, in part, on the bildungsroman - the genre “connected more than any other to the rise of modern nationalism” (Tobias Boes).
My contribution to “The Postcolonial Bildungsroman,” a scholarly volume edited by Arnab Dutta Roy and Paul Ugor and published by the University of Alberta Press, focuses on two radically different South African bildungsromane: the first is Nadia Davids’ 2014 novel An Imperfect Blessing. This is a text, I argue, that shows how ideas central to the TRC - confession, forgiveness, storytelling-as-repair - come to define the genre after the end of apartheid. In contrast, K Sello Duiker’s 2001 novella Thirteen Cents offers a radical refusal of both the techniques of the TRC and the idea that joining the post-apartheid nation represents the natural endpoint of the coming-of-age genre.
You can learn more about the book here, and access it electronically via most university libraries.
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My journal article on Imraan Coovadia’s sprawling novel asks what happens when both literature and the nation-state claim dominion over concepts of history and time. While South African literary studies has often been obsessed with ideas of periodization (is this a post-apartheid novel? A post-post-apartheid novel? A post-TRC novel?) I argue that Coovadia’s complex narrative shows that national literature need not be defined by its relationship to the state, nor capital’s, claim over time itself.
You can access this article here. -
On a gloomy Vancouver afternoon, a friend who specializes in biodiversity research told me about a strange phenomenon she had observed during her fieldwork in Costa Rica; when farmers had poor harvests they would often blame the ubiquitous great-tailed Grackle for their misfortune. The bird, which breeds in Costa Rica along with most of North and Central America, was described as a “Nicaraguan” bird by these farmers. The bird, it seemed, was a symbol of deeply-felt ideas around nationalism, foreignness and economic prosperity.
Coincidentally, I had been reading Neville Hoad’s influential text African Intimacies, which also makes a reference to the idea that in the context of South Africa immigrants from neighbouring African states are derogatively referred to as “makwerekwere” a term Hoad speculates may originate with the mimicry of the grackle in Southern Africa.
This surprising echo led to the coining of the term “eco-xenophobia,” a term that describes how non-human species come to be classified as foreign or as “other” and not the “rightful” occupants of a territory.
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In this talk, given online at the University of the Free State, I argue that South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission has come to operate as the infrastructure through which South African literature has been produced and understood. While the TRC only operated between 1996 and 2003, I demonstrate that it still has crucial influences on the concept of narrative and literature in South Africa.