5 - Of Xenophobia and Other Bigotries: Forging Transcultural Visions

Summary

In chapter 3, I argued that Njabulo Ndebele and Zakes Mda urge the black population of South Africa to move beyond their justified anger about past oppression in order to build a society superior to apartheid. Here I develop these core arguments and examine how the younger, postapartheid generation of writers—notably Phaswane Mpe, Ivan Vladislavić, and K. Sello Duiker—seeks to defy the binary thinking of the postapartheid era in the interest of forging a transcultural future. In the concluding section of this chapter, I discuss Damon Galgut's The Impostor as a work that highlights empathy as a tool of social cohesion. As I hope to make evident in my discussion, these authors use Coetzee's rhetorical and hermeneutical gestures by deploying the virtues of basic human encounter to defuse the horrors of the irrational fear of the other. They promote empathy and cosmopolitan imagination as transgressive to the absolutism of nativist ideologies and as capable of promoting transcultural affinity. Either directly or indirectly, Mpe, Vladislavić, and Duiker rely on Waiting for the Barbarians as an intertextual frame.

In Welcome to Our Hillbrow, Mpe makes specific reference to Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians. The migrants are seen as the cause of nearly all the social and moral malaise in Hillbrow. The situation in Hillbrow replicates that in an unnamed town in Waiting where the indigenous people are characterized as barbarians by the colonizing power and are seen as the cause of social evils in society. Ken Barris discusses the infl uence of Coetzee's first novel, Dusklands (1974), on Vladislavić, arguing that “despite Vladislavić's originality, commonalities between the early writing of J. M. Coetzee and his own are evident. These commonalities are sufficiently numerous and significant to justify their characterization as an intertextuality of technical means.” In an interview with Christopher Warnes, Vladislavić admits to Coetzee's influence: “I came to Coetzee slightly later. He's a superb writer. It's impossible to write in South Africa without being influenced by him. I keep returning to my ‘formative years.’” Vladislavić's commonality with Coetzee is especially evident in their handling of tropes as means of creating hermeneutic contexts. Vladislavić uses the categories of purity/impurity, outsider/ insider, and us/them to characterize and challenge the traditional conceptions of community and solidarity in South Africa.