Ruptures in Harmonizing Discourses: Exemplifications in some Works of Black and White Writers in a Democratic South Africa

Abstract

Some writers have attempted a comparison of South African post-apartheid literature written by blacks with that produced by their white compatriots, as in Anne Putter’s (2012) enlightening analyses of Ivan Vladislavic’s The Restless Supermarket (2012) and Kgebetli Moele’s Room 207 (2006). A writer such as Milazzo (2015, 2017) has discussed some discourses tying together apartheidera and post-apartheid South African English literature, among them continued considerations of institutional racism. The point of departure of my present study is that postmodernist transnational features, seen by some critics as characterising post-apartheid South African literature written in English, have been highlighted at the cost of the deviances obtained in the literature. In this paper, I compare conceptions of the post-apartheid South African city represented by Ivan Vladislavic’s satirised white characters on the one hand, and on the other hand those of the black characters in the works of Niq Mhlongo, Kgebetli Moele and Phaswane Mpe. Collectively and across the two categories, I scrutinize the four writers’ novels Welcome to Our Hillbrow (2001), Dog Eat Dog (2004), Room 207 (2006), The Book of the Dead (2009), Double Negative (2011), The Restless Supermarket (2012), Untitled (2013) and Way Back Home (2013). I interpret the later texts by black writers in relation to their earlier long narratives, in order to take account of the evolution of this category of my selected texts to the period in which their later works grapple with social issues of the same era as those of the white writer Vladislavic. I hope to reveal how dynamically the discourses in the fiction of the two categories of writers constitute counterpoints that, decoded with adequate rigour, represent more nuanced depictions of the post-apartheid society of their common milieu.