Event, Exceptionalism, and the Imperceptible: The Politics of Nadine Gordimer’s The Pickup

Nadine Gordimer’s The Pickup dramatizes how the errant energies of the postcolonial as event exceed paradoxical discourses of national exceptionalism, while illustrating the weight of mounting failures of postapartheid social and economic transformations in a world of global capital. Through her masterful use of passive voice, her complex framing of characters as effects of discourses, racialization, material determinations, and time, Gordimer registers the “facts” of the event and forces of time irreducible to history. In doing so, Gordimer highlights expressions of the event insinuated into bodily action and collectivities, impersonal forces that might precipitate new political futures.