The Question of Dwelling: South Africa and Elsewhere

Abstract

What does dwelling mean both in South Africa and more broadly in the world today? Dwelling is connected with ideas of the home in both narrow and broad senses. In the narrow sense, it concerns the home as domestic space; in the broad, the homeland or country. The two aspects are linked: dwelling in the home is connected to dwelling in the homeland – who is welcome, who belongs, who does not. This has inevitable resonance in the South African setting, during both the apartheid and post-apartheid eras, where dwelling has been a fractured and fragmented phenomenon, but it has applications elsewhere as well, including the US under the sway of populism, inequality and refugee exclusion. In South Africa the concept of ‘elsewhere’ has direct implications, where European culture imposed (in differential ways) its ‘elsewhere’ on the South African landscape, and black South Africans found their own homeland an ‘elsewhere’ to them. The ambiguities and hauntings of this phenomenon are reflected in both black and white writing, which the article explores. It also draws out the conceptual dimensions of dwelling, via figures such as Adorno, Heidegger and Levinas; the latter’s focus on the meaning of hospitality is central. The attempt here, in an essay that draws on the autobiographical as well as the literary and theoretical, is to fashion a notion of dwelling that understands errancy built into the term’s very nature. Rather than the walls which define fragmented dwelling, we need a different sense of the boundary spaces we inhabit.