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"Apartheid Fiction."
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White dog fell from the sky : a novel
A portrait of 1970s Botswana is told through the intertwined stories of three people, including a medical student who is forced to flee apartheid South Africa after witnessing a murder and an American Ph.D. student who abandons her studies to follow her husband to Africa.
Book
Who are ‘we’? Don’t make me laugh
This paper explores the implications of uses of the word 'we' in post-apartheid South African fiction. 'We' in these novels is typically a contested linguistic site - which tells of the loss of inherited communities, and reflects the ethically complex negotiations of a 'we' perhaps still to come. Yet if the internal narratives assert a loss of community, each event of the novel's being-read inaugurates a new 'community' of readers. The paper considers the ethical implications of the act of reading a literary text in post-apartheid South Africa. In the course of the argument, I draw links between African philosophies of community, and Jean-Luc Nancy's proposition that 'I' does not precede 'we'. Thus I suggest some ways in which philosophies from Africa contribute towards current debates about 'we' in contemporary continental philosophy.[PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]
Journal Article
STATES OF UNFREEDOM: IDENTITY AND BIOPOLITICS IN J.M. COETZEE’S FICTION
This article examines the intricate intersections of identity, biopolitics, and freedom in the select works of J.M. Coetzee, focusing primarily on Waiting for the Barbarians, Life & Times of Michael K, and Disgrace. Coetzee’s fiction consistently interrogates the conditions under which individuals are subjected to states of unfreedom, whether through imperial conquest, apartheid structures, or post-apartheid transitions. Drawing on theoretical insights from Michel Foucault’s concept of discipline, Giorgio Agamben’s notion of homo sacer and bare life, and Achille Mbembe’s framework of necropolitics, the study investigates how biopolitical control shapes identity and circumscribes possibilities of resistance. The analysis foregrounds the precariousness of human subjectivity under regimes of surveillance, violence, and systemic inequality. While Coetzee presents characters who resist domination—Michael K’s withdrawal, Lucy’s ambiguous agency, or the Magistrate’s ethical awakening—their freedom remains paradoxical, partial, or contingent. By situating these narratives within both colonial and postcolonial contexts, the article highlights how Coetzee universalizes the struggle for freedom while grounding it in specific histories of power. Ultimately, the study argues that Coetzee’s fiction exposes not only the persistence of unfreedom but also the ethical responsibility of witnessing and narrating lives under oppression. In doing so, his works resonate with contemporary global concerns over surveillance, displacement, and human rights.
Journal Article
The housemaid's daughter
When Cathleen Harrington leaves her home in Ireland in 1919 to travel to South Africa, she knows that she doesn't love the man she's to marry there--her fiancâe Edward, whom she has not seen for five years. Isolated and estranged in a small town in the harsh Karoo desert, her only real companions are her diary and her housemaid, and later the housemaid's daughter Ada. When Ada is born, Cathleen recognizes in her someone she can love and respond to in a way that she cannot with her own family.
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NEGOTIATING OTHERNESS: IDENTITY, POWER, AND SURVIVAL IN J.M. COETZEE’S POST-APARTHEID NARRATIVES
This article investigates the negotiation of otherness, identity, and survival in J.M. Coetzee’s post-apartheid narratives, with particular focus on Disgrace (1999) and selective references to later works such as Elizabeth Costello (2003) and The Childhood of Jesus (2013). Coetzee’s fiction foregrounds how post-apartheid South Africa remains a space of contested identities, shifting power relations, and fragile freedoms. Through characters such as David Lurie, Melanie Isaacs, Lucy, and Petrus, Disgrace dramatizes the interplay of gendered vulnerability, racial power, and land politics. Lucy’s refusal of legal recourse after her assault and her decision to remain on her farm under Petrus’s protection exemplify “strategic unfreedom,” a form of survival that complicates liberal ideals of autonomy. Lurie’s moral transformation, marked by humility in caring for abandoned animals, highlights Coetzee’s ethical turn toward recognizing otherness in all its forms—human and nonhuman. Drawing on postcolonial theory (Bhabha, Spivak), biopolitics and necropolitics (Foucault, Mbembe), and the ethics of alterity (Levinas), the study demonstrates that survival in Coetzee’s post-apartheid fiction is less about heroic resistance than about fragile negotiations of vulnerability, silence, and dependence. The analysis concludes that Coetzee redefines freedom not as absolute mastery but as ethical survival within conditions of unfreedom, thereby situating his work at the intersection of political critique and moral responsibility.
Journal Article
The soccer fence : a story of friendship, hope and apartheid in South Africa
Each time Hector watches white boys playing soccer in Johannesburg, South Africa, he dreams of playing on a real pitch one day. After the fall of apartheid, when he sees the 1996 African Cup of Nations team, he knows that his dream can come true.
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Véronique Tadjo’s Transnational Experience of South Africa in “Cette ville m’a giflée”
L’auteure et peintre franco-ivoirienne Véronique Tadjo est une figure forte de la connectivité africaine et du transnationalisme. Sa vie est une exploration sans fin du soi et de l’autre, de l’identité et de l’appartenance, des notions qu’elle investit et examine à partir de ses expériences géographiques personnelles et de son œuvre littéraire multifacette. Cet essai se propose d’étudier comment Tadjo place ses fictions et sa vie dans une perspective transnationaliste pour engager une réflexion sur la réconciliation africaine et la mémoire collective. Dans un second temps, nous montrerons comment sa nouvelle « Cette ville m’a giflée » peut être considérée comme une autofiction qui témoigne de la confrontation intime de Tadjo à Johannesburg — lieu du transnationalisme par excellence. À travers cette communauté post-apartheid incapable d’atteindre ses rêves de « nation arc-en-ciel », Tadjo évoque ce passé et ce futur irréconciliables, observe les cicatrices gigantesques et béantes laissées par l’histoire sur les comportements sociaux et souligne la difficulté pour les Sud-Africains d’évoluer vers un futur incertain. The Franco-Ivorian writer and painter Véronique Tadjo is a great representation of African connectivity and transnationalism. Her life has been an endless exploration of the self and the other, of the identity and the belonging, notions that she crosses and examines through her personal geographical experiences as well as her multifaceted literary work. This essay explores how Tadjo places her fictions and her life in a transnationalist perspective with the aim of initiating a reflection on African reconciliation and collective memory. Secondly, we show how her short story “Cette ville m’a giflée” can be considered as a transnational auto-fiction featuring Tadjo’s intimate confrontation with Johannesburg—a transnational place par excellence. Through the post-apartheid community unable to achieve the dreamed “rainbow nation,” Tadjo evokes an irreconcilable past and present, observes the gigantic open scars left by history on social behaviours and underlines the difficulty for South Africans to transit towards an uncertain future.
Journal Article
'It may have seemed personal but it wasn't': The Person(al) as Nation(al) in Post-Apartheid Literary Representations of Retribution
Crime fiction has experienced a boom in popularity in South Africa in recent years. While some critics argue over the high- or lowbrow status of the genre, a more fruitful approach may be to consider how fiction about crime addresses particular themes in order to negotiate contested ideas of nation-ness. This article will first assess how the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and the osmosis between creative non-fiction and crime fiction have laid the foundations for a discourse whereby personal narratives of justice and victimhood are transposed to a level of national significance. Narratives of revenge are a key route by which authors of crime fiction tackle a sense of unfulfilled justice. Violent crimes in Achmat Dangor's Bitter Fruit, J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace and Deon Meyer's Devil's Peak are narrated from differing perspectives, portrayed variously as acts of disproportionate revenge or violently just retribution. In these novels, the characters impart wider significance to their own violence and victimhood, tying themselves to the failures of the TRC and the new nation's supposed inability to deliver justice. In Bitter Fruit, Disgrace, and Margie Oford's Daddy's Girl, sexual violence is portrayed as a weapon to right historic grievances. Contemporary crime fiction both reinforces and challenges popular misconceptions about rape, encouraging audiences to reassess notions regarding the post-colonial state. With familial metaphors for the nation prevalent in post-apartheid South Africa, narratives of intra-familial sexual violence highlight issues surrounding inter-generational responsibility and the recurrence of a violent past.
Journal Article
Intersectional (In)visibility in the 21st-Century South African Queer-Themed Short Story
Through a comparative reading of four queer-themed South African short stories published in the 2010s, this article argues that recent South African short fiction brings new subtleties and nuances to the straightforward and often-unproblematized valorization of queer \"visibility.\" The article contends that the stories foreground the intersectionality of queer visibility in post-apartheid South Africa—pointing to some of the ways in which the contemporary South African moment continues to be defined by hetero-patriarchal norms, class disparities, and racialized divisions. The article further examines how the stories create textured queer visibilities that humanize queer subjectivities and subvert dominant racialized and gendered discourses in the post-apartheid present.
Journal Article