Postmodernism and black writing in South Africa

Abstract

I am concerned in this chapter not with the validity or propriety of postmodernist theory and practice with regard to South African literature taken in its aggregate. That debate has been going on for some time now within the country and in my opinion remains inconclusive. My purpose is to insist that in South Africa there exists an unhealed – I will not say incurable – split between black and white writing, between on the one side an urgent need to document and to bear witness and on the other the capacity to go on furlough, to loiter, and to experiment. This split, apart from the linguistic medium, will find no ready analogy in the difference between, say, Afrikaans and English literatures, a division which is only comparable to the difference between regional literatures in the United States, especially between southern and northern, and between rural and urban writing, a difference which is largely a matter of a constellation of certain themes and preoccupations. Though often treated as natural, sometimes as a positive sign of our cultural diversity and richness, and as such a reason for celebration rather than regret, this difference between black and white writing can also be read as a sign of social disparity and technological discrepancy. In a post apartheid South Africa it is clearly a cause for embarrassment. It exists on the one side as a reminder of historical neglect and the impoverishment of black writing and on the other of cultural privilege and opportunity in the case of white writing.

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