The (Im)possibility of a New Cosmopolitanism? Damon Galgut’s Critique of Residual Cultural Scripts in The Impostor

Abstract

This article analyses Damon Galgut’s 2008 novel, The Impostor, in light of recent critiques which argue that South African writing is beset by “repetition compulsions” (Boehmer 2018: 90) that betray the nation’s sublimated traumas and unhealable wounds. It argues that Galgut’s novel does not simply rehearse the tropes of South Africa’s literature of crisis, but rather subjects them to extended metafictional and ironic critique. Among the targets of Galgut’s satire is the state of petrified suspension that regualrly marks the white post-apartheid condition and which is undergirded, he shows, by a residual archive of pastoral and colonial scripts. These scripts make the realisation of what Paul Gilroy has called a “new cosmopolitanism” (2005: 287) in South Africa impossible, but they can be dispelled, the novel suggests, by cultivating modes of ironic self-awareness in which we come to understand our alterity as the very enabling condition of forming a life with others.