South Africa in the Global Imaginary: An Introduction

1. The Elements in Play

What I want to write about is the penetration, expansion, skirmishing, coupling, mixing, separation, regrouping of peoples and cultures—the glorious bastardisation of men and women mutually shaped by sky and rain and wind and soil. . . . And everywhere is exile; we tend to forget that now. The old ground disappears, expropriated by blood as new conflicting patterns emerge.

Breyten Breytenbach, Dog Heart, 1998

Introductions to South African literary culture conceived as an entity have a peculiar trademark: They apologize for attempting to do the impossible and then go ahead anyway.¹ This gesture, ranging from rhetorical genuflection to anxious self-examination to searing critique of others who have dared to undertake what should not be attempted lightly, reveals a significant fault line in the field of South African literary studies, although field is a problematic metaphor here, like almost every other metaphor one cares to use. Literary “fields”—entities, groupings—require some reason other than the mere convenience of geography for their existence: they need minimal convergence in the domains of origin, language, culture, history, and nationalism (contested or not) to become, in some sense, cohesive and interreferential. But in the South African case each of these domains fragments into heterogeneity the moment one looks more closely at the literary objects at hand. As I argue later in this introduction, cultural heterogeneity is nothing new or surprising in a context of globalization, but the South African case is peculiar because it remains to this day a scene of largely unresolved difference.

Arguments about the origins of South African “literature” still shuttle between different languages, different nationalisms, and different notions of culture, history, and belonging in mutually excluding series and genealogies. For example, a symbolic source object of the field might variously be given as the oral bushman song, the epic account of Portuguese seafaring around the Cape, the Dutch register of occupation, the English travel diary, the Xhosa praise song, the French pastoral narrative of Africa, or the Scottish romantic ballad. These objects of culture have seldom been aware of each other, despite their geographic contiguity. And take note: the above list is not exhaustive. In saying this, as I must, I too bend to the rhetorical necessity that marks the field as something beyond the limits of singular description.

The evidence of such referential fracture in the signifier “South African literature” is visible in day-to-day literary practice. Anthologists and writers of general histories of South African literature, because of the contingencies of publishing, markets, and marketing, tend to work within one language and to write for particular audiences. These audiences almost always exclude some of the other groups and individuals who, in the final analysis, must also be regarded as part of the thoroughly polyglot South African scene with its eleven “official” languages. It is usually with such an awareness of the complexity of the field in mind that the trademark apology is proffered. So, for example, when André Brink and J. M. Coetzee (1986: 7) published their anthology of South African writing, A Land Apart, they immediately genuflected as follows: “It has not been our ambition to give a full picture of the wealth and range of contemporary writing, by writers both Black and White, working in English, Afrikaans, Xhosa, Zulu, Sotho and the other languages of South Africa. The collection is offered as the personal choice of the editors.” Note that, even within the broadest possible description, such as that above, the telltale ellipsis remains, “and the other languages of South Africa,” as if not even at the level of macrodescription, not even in catalog terms, do these two doyens of South African writing feel it is possible to “cover” the field. In this case as in most others, the ritual nod to an always greater diversity occurs at a particular moment of publication and for a particular context. For Brink and Coetzee it is Faber and...