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Thando Mgqolozana’s Unimportance traces one night in the life of a student on the verge of being elected Student Representative Council (SRC) president of the University of the Western Cape (UWC). Troublingly, though, the protagonist, Zizi, has physically and verbally abused his girlfriend, Pamodi, and he now fears the imminent revelation of this news. But through the course of one night, Zizi undergoes a seemingly dramatic transformation. Where for much of the narrative he is willing to go to great lengths to ensure that what he has done to Pamodi is not revealed to others, by the end of the story he himself discloses his actions to the student body in the form of a speech. He does so because he comes to the conclusion that he lacks integrity and must act to restore it in himself, even if it costs him his political career. In order to do so, Zizi will renounce the “spectacular” political world for the “ordinary” world of people. In this article, I explore the complexity of the vision of renewal (of Zizi and more broadly of South African politics) that Zizi provides and argue that his development is fundamentally flawed because it is premised on the notion of a personal sense of self that is separate and distinct from the social order. I therefore show that it is inevitable that his change of character does not correlate with a meaningful alteration of his relationship to and ideas on women. Instead, I contend that the novel actually is quite critical of Zizi’s so-called transformation precisely because of its limited invocation of responsibility. By way of contrast, I discuss the #RememberKhwezi protest of 2016 and focus on the ways in which it confronted then-President Jacob Zuma, his party, and the wider South African public with their complicity with gender-based violence. What most interests me, finally, is the potential of a South African literature that, like Unimportance, moves beyond ideas of personal culpability and agency in order to explore power and its effects in complex and transformative ways.

This is the first collection of essays on the fiction of award-winning and internationally-acclaimed author, Zoë Wicomb, who grew up in Namaqualand, South Africa and who for many years has lived and taught in Glasgow, Scotland. Her writing, like her life, moves constantly between these two locales, among others. Moreover, Wicomb connects the two spaces in other ways, especially through her exploration of the effects of the colonial history that binds them. For this reason, the editors, Kai Easton and Derek Attridge, have chosen the frame of the translocal for this collection. According to Dorothy Driver, the translocal is an appropriate lens through which to consider Wicomb’s fiction because “her writing often sees associations between Scotland and South Africa in their local rather than national aspect.” Driver further notes that “[t]he term takes account […] of Wicomb’s interest in regional social practices that cross national borders and her avowed lack of interest in nationalism and the national” (7). Cóilín Parsons, in his piece for this collection, also notes that this refusal of the national as the “scale” by which global connectivity can be theorised might offer new paths of enquiry for postcolonial studies (84–85), a line of thought that I personally find intriguing and persuasive. Like the editors of this book, I think a collection of essays that specifically focuses on Wicomb’s fiction is overdue. Furthermore, the notion of the translocal proves to be a subtle, nuanced and yet coherent framework with which to analyse Wicomb’s complex fictional works. This line of argument, along with the quality of the contributions which develop it, is impressive.

In this paper, I investigate some of the reasons for the relative paucity of scholarly attention given to Niq Mhlongo's debut novel, Dog Eat Dog. I argue that this text anticipates and articulates themes that are vital to contemporary South African culture generally, and to the academic space of the university specifically. For this reason, I contend that it is a work worthy of consideration, both because of its unusual form (it is a novel of ordeal rather than a Bildungsroman), and its prescient depiction of issues to do with institutional racism and academic exclusion - subjects which were central during the student-led protests on South African campuses in 2015 and 2016. A principal thesis of this article is that one of the reasons for literary study's unwillingness to engage with the novel is the discipline's predisposition to a hermeneutics of suspicion, a method of analysis that I show is unsuited to Mhlongo's text. Instead, I argue for the use of surface reading as a valid and appropriate praxis given the form and the content of Dog Eat Dog.

In this paper, I investigate some of the reasons for the relative paucity of scholarly attention given to Niq Mhlongo’s debut novel, Dog Eat Dog. I argue that this text anticipates and articulates themes that are vital to contemporary South African culture generally, and to the academic space of the university specifically. For this reason, I contend that it is a work worthy of consideration, both because of its unusual form (it is a novel of ordeal rather than a Bildungsroman), and its prescient depiction of issues to do with institutional racism and academic exclusion – subjects which were central during the student-led protests on South African campuses in 2015 and 2016. A principal thesis of this article is that one of the reasons for literary study’s unwillingness to engage with the novel is the discipline’s predisposition to a hermeneutics of suspicion, a method of analysis that I show is unsuited to Mhlongo’s text. Instead, I argue for the use of surface reading as a valid and appropriate praxis given the form and the content of Dog Eat Dog.

The politics of the protagonist of Ivan Vladislavić's Double Negative, Neville Lister, are broadly liberal during apartheid, but show signs of becoming more conservative during the post-apartheid era. In this article, I argue that this development is unsurprising because bourgeois white liberals and conservatives in South Africa continue to cling to the privileges afforded them as the propertied class. For this reason, acknowledgements of privilege and quests for discomfort, while not necessarily dishonest, do not in and of themselves constitute progressive politics. Rather, one can, as Neville does, become comfortable with discomfort so long as it allows one to enjoy a privileged lifestyle. I therefore draw a distinction between the unease argued for in much of what constitutes whiteness studies, and a sense of being lost that seems to demand the loss of the home and its attendant association with control. This sense of lostness emerges in two ways in the novel: in a description of a photograph that contains the spectral presence of a dead child, and in a game that Neville played when he was a young boy. Both of these sections of the text also deal with the limits of art - of writing and of photography in particular. I propose that these self-reflexive episodes suggest the novel's own limits, and gesture beyond them in ways that are worth consideration by its middle-class readership.

The politics of the protagonist of Ivan Vladislavić's Double Negative, Neville Lister, are broadly liberal during apartheid, but show signs of becoming more conservative during the post-apartheid era. In this article, I argue that this development is unsurprising because bourgeois white liberals and conservatives in South Africa continue to cling to the privileges afforded them as the propertied class. For this reason, acknowledgements of privilege and quests for discomfort, while not necessarily dishonest, do not in and of themselves constitute progressive politics. Rather, one can, as Neville does, become comfortable with discomfort so long as it allows one to enjoy a privileged lifestyle. I therefore draw a distinction between the unease argued for in much of what constitutes whiteness studies, and a sense of being lost that seems to demand the loss of the home and its attendant association with control. This sense of lostness emerges in two ways in the novel: in a description of a photograph that contains the spectral presence of a dead child, and in a game that Neville played when he was a young boy. Both of these sections of the text also deal with the limits of art - of writing and of photography in particular. I propose that these self-reflexive episodes suggest the novel's own limits, and gesture beyond them in ways that are worth consideration by its middle-class readership.

The politics of the protagonist of Ivan Vladislavić’s Double Negative, Neville Lister, are broadly liberal during apartheid, but show signs of becoming more conservative during the post-apartheid era. In this article, I argue that this development is unsurprising because bourgeois white liberals and conservatives in South Africa continue to cling to the privileges afforded them as the propertied class. For this reason, acknowledgements of privilege and quests for discomfort, while not necessarily dishonest, do not in and of themselves constitute progressive politics. Rather, one can, as Neville does, become comfortable with discomfort so long as it allows one to enjoy a privileged lifestyle. I therefore draw a distinction between the unease argued for in much of what constitutes whiteness studies, and a sense of being lost that seems to demand the loss of the home and its attendant association with control. This sense of lostness emerges in two ways in the novel: in a description of a photograph that contains the spectral presence of a dead child, and in a game that Neville played when he was a young boy. Both of these sections of the text also deal with the limits of art – of writing and of photography in particular. I propose that these self-reflexive episodes suggest the novel’s own limits, and gesture beyond them in ways that are worth consideration by its middle-class readership.