Dissertation

Inequality, Moralism and Legitimacy in South African Literature : Re-Reading Apartheid from Millin to Wicomb

Emmett, Christine

2020

Overview

Racialised inequality has existed in South Africa since the arrival of the first settlers, so that the shadow of illegitimacy has fallen upon successive governments and ruling classes. Along with changing political and material contexts, claims to legitimacy have been altered and reformulated. This thesis argues that these discourses have been instrumental to the development of the novel in South Africa, and that representations of totality and history have necessarily sought to support, critique or reformulate these discourses. Two decades after apartheid, South Africa remains a profoundly unequal society. Therefore the scope of this thesis spans the years from the 1940s to the 2000s, using historical-contextual and close reading to determine how specific novels have registered and responded to drives to counter, justify or legitimate the power of a small ruling class. Discourses of legitimacy have travelled under various guises - from sexuality and white supremacy, to paternalist hierarchies, internecine cultural rivalries, claims of popular consent, pragmatism and depoliticisation and the collapse of class into racial difference. By focusing on these I attempt to historicise formal questions about the South African novel, like the prominence of didacticism and difficulties of representing spontaneity. I argue that an individualized and identity-based moralism about racism has been shaped by class interests - and that this has led to an equivalent blindness to the historically specific character of race and racism in South African prose narrative. In this vein, each chapter offers a close reading which challenges orthodox readings by highlighting the salience of class and legitimacy. Readings are offered of the work of Sarah Gertrude Millin, in terms of cultural rivalries between English-speakers and Afrikaners at the dawn of apartheid; of Nadine Gordimer's Late Bourgeois World, in terms of 1960s' repression and dissent; and of John Miles's Kroniek uit die doofpot, in terms of late apartheid's purportedly \"non-ideological\" emphasis on pragmatism and technocracy. The thesis also departs from the ruling party's discourse to consider the way in which legitimacy was constructed by antiapartheid Nationalist movements. Thus, novelistic depictions of the 1976 Soweto Uprising by Miriam Tlali, Mbulelo Mzamane, Sipho Sepamla and Mongane Serote, prefigure the class divisions and tensions in contemporary South Africa. It concludes with a consideration of Achmat Dangor's Bitter Fruit and Zoë Wicomb's Playing in the Light, fictions in which postapartheid discourses and the construction of a heroic nationalist narrative are read against continuing inequality, class immobility and the troubled legitimacy of the national elite.

• Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
• Subject: African literature / Apartheid / Inequality / Legitimacy / Pragmatism / Racism