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"Ivan Vladislavić"
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“Wishy-washy liberalism” and “the art of getting lost” in Ivan Vladislavić’s
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.
Journal Article
Horrors of the Half-Forgotten: Explosive Memories in Ivan Vladislavić's \The Firedogs\
The article presents the first scholarly engagement with Ivan Vladislavić's neglected short story \"The Firedogs\" (1996), which anticipates a concern that has gradually become more important in this author's work, namely how the past continues to infuse the material structures that order everyday life. I show here how Vladislavic's story illuminates the ways in which present circumstances shape one's recollection of the past, and how the past gives meaning to the present in an ongoing process of identity formation.
Journal Article
Ivan Vladislavić's Aesthetics of Detritus in \Autopsy\ and \Propaganda by Monuments\
In this article, I examine detritus as a central trope for post-transitional South African society, an idea that, I argue, has particular relevance for Ivan Vladislavić's second short story collection, Propaganda by Monuments. As a point of departure, I use Leon de Kock's idea of the \"democratic moment\" – the moment of radical globalization coinciding with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the crumbling of apartheid bureaucracy. In this new \"democratic\" age, cultural detritus - remnants, fragments and addenda - begins to circulate and litter transnational contexts, finding its way into the unlikeliest of spaces, producing cultural resonances, echoes and cross-talk. In Propaganda by Monuments, detritus carries exotic charges of meaning, and allows for alternative ways of seeing the urban landscape in the new democratic era, in which the nation state has begun its process of dissipation. As such, Propaganda by Monuments can perhaps be read as a prelude to Vladislavić's third collection of stories, 101 Detectives, in which the detritus has been swept away, and polished surfaces are angled towards the protagonists, and the reader, narrowing their margins for subjectivity and self-styling.
Journal Article
Re-Reading the Past: Monuments, History and Representation in Short Stories by Ivan Vladislavić and Zoë Wicomb
As representations of particular moments in history, monuments provide useful indices for processes of remembering and forgetting that accompany 'regime change'. Their paradoxical representational instability and their exposure to multiple readings and counter-readings over time make monuments fascinating material for literary investigations of the unstable nature of representation itself. Both Ivan Vladislavić and Zoë Wicomb have used the trope of monuments in their short stories, enabling them to explore acts of reading that reveal a spectrum of interpretations, often ironically resistant to the authorised version of history being celebrated. This article argues that, in drawing attention to these particular cultural constructions, both writers are also underscoring the ironies inherent in the inability of cultural forms to 'fix' either the past or the present, particularly in transitional historical moments.
Journal Article
Trauma and Transformation in African Literature
This book fills a gap in the field of contemporary trauma studies by interrogating the relevance of trauma for African literatures. Kurtz argues that a thoughtful application of trauma theory in relation to African literatures is in fact a productive exercise, and furthermore that the benefits of this exercise include not only what it can do for African literature, but also what it can do for trauma studies. He makes the case for understanding trauma healing within the larger project of peacebuilding, with an emphasis on the transformative potential of what he terms the African moral imagination as embodied in the creative work of its writers. He offers readings of selected works by Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Chimamanda Adichie, and Nuruddin Farah as case studies for how African literature can influence our understanding of trauma and trauma healing. This will be a valuable volume for those with interests in current trends and developments in trauma studies, African literary studies, postcolonial studies, and memory studies.
eBook
'Minor disorders': Ivan Vladislavić and the devolution of South African English
This article argues that Ivan Vladislavić's aesthetically radical fictions interrogate the authority of English as a language imposed by colonialism and globalisation. Diverging from the romantic legacy of English letters in South Africa, which has seen literature as an ideal expression of an inner truth, Vladislavić's writing deals with the materiality of the sign and, more specifically, the print medium. In his latest, hilarious novel, The Restless Supermarket, the ironical tension between the perception of English as an ideal order and the shape-shifting materiality of the sign produces what I (following Deleuze) call a minoritisation of English. However, Vladislavić targets not only the high cultural authority of British English, but equally the instrumentalised English of advertising and commercial media. As he ludically reshuffles and defamiliarises the conventions of both 'high' and 'low' language, Vladislavić places South African English in the larger flow of transnational history and enables language to function as a mode of becoming rather than being.
Journal Article
\Wishy-washy liberalism\ and \the art of getting lost\ in Ivan Vladislavić's \Double Negative\
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.
Journal Article
The Civic Scale: Strategies of Emplacement in Dambudzo Marechera and Ivan Vladislavić
This paper identifies and intervenes in the problems posed by reading postcolonial texts as representative, or encompassing of, the nation with which they are associated. Alternatively, it proposes that reading at the scale of the city offers a method for circumventing the elision of particularity which occurs when the nation, continent or globe are foregrounded in Western or Western-facing responses to these texts. The paper models what such a “scaled-down” reading might look like, attending to Dambudzo Marechera’s House of Hunger (1978) and Ivan Vladislavic’s Portrait With Keys: Joburg and What-What (2006), and their intricate relationships to the urban spaces of Harare and Johannesburg, respectively. At stake in these analyses are opportunities to identify what Jacques Rancière terms dissensus, or political contestation, rendered in spatial terms. This establishes a pliable counterdiscourse of the city which seeks and discerns meaning not through consensus or “sanctioned representation”; but through the complexities of affective attachments, the plurality of experiences, and the teeming heterogeneity of physical and literary spaces that have been previously flattened.
Journal Article