Chapter 6 returns to questions of identity and citizenship, specifically what ‘South African’ means by contrast with ‘African’. The terms of this conversation have been pre- and over-determined by violent xenophobia, with major outbreaks having taken place across the country in 2008, 2015 and 2019. This chapter pauses on our understanding of the causes of xenophobic violence, especially South African exceptionalism, before considering in more detail the country’s literary responses to the phenomenon. On the one hand, writers like Phaswane Mpe, Patricia Schonstein and Andrew Brown develop strategies for interrogating xenophobic myths and for cultivating sympathy for migrants. However, some of these techniques hinge on questionable assumptions which threaten their humanising goals. Other South African works, like the film District 9 and an early work by Richard Kunzmann, develop explicit xenophobic tropes which can be understood in relation to the domestication of threat and the negotiation of change in South Africa after apartheid.

This book shows how South African writing can help us to understand change after apartheid. It begins with the idea that imaginative writing offers productive, sometimes profound, insight into questions of major concern. It aims to shift the attention of literary criticism away from a narrow set of highbrow South African authors and towards the study of a wider range of texts, including popular fiction. And it exemplifies the benefits of an interdisciplinary approach by honing the focus of the study on specific concepts and topics. The object of analysis, at its largest level, is the South African polity as it veered between the hopeful optimism of the ‘Rainbow nation’ under Nelson Mandela, the murderous muddling of Thabo Mbeki and the ‘captured state’ under Jacob Zuma. Questions of a political, economic and sociological cast are central, with changes in the workplace, land reform, indigenous knowledge, corruption, crime and xenophobia providing specific points of focus. The creative literature of the post-apartheid period has a unique and powerful capacity to illuminate these issues and to intervene in our understanding of them.

There are few issues in South African politics, culture and literature more resonant, more freighted, more emotive, than land. Chapter 5 begins by observing the ongoing centrality of land and ownership, especially in the wake of land reform programmes and populist shifts in political rhetoric. Novels by Anne Landsman, Marlene van Niekerk and Damon Galgut engage in detail with the crucial question of ownership, which is linked to race. They explore connections between the abject, labour and ownership, with the bodily and affective experiences shared by white women farmers and their brown or black workers being central themes of each novel. These novels struggle to articulate answers to the challenges of land reform, but they also foreground intimate gestures of recompense. In relation to the ethics of care, and the practices associated with love, they mark an important beginning of the conversation between the post-apartheid pastoral on the one hand, and land reform on the other.

The second chapter continues the examination of class aspiration, but this time from the point of view of those entering the middle and upper-middle classes. Here government policies of affirmative action and Black Economic Empowerment have borne fruit for some. But the benefits of these policies come with strings attached, for the workplace is often experienced as hostile and unwelcoming. Life in the suburbs, even for the nouveau riche, can be alienating. The key texts studied in this chapter, aided by a wealth of ethnography in this area, are popular romances (Sapphire Press, Nollybooks) and ‘chick lit’ (Zukiswa Wanner, Cynthia Jele) aimed at black female South Africans. These texts, it is argued, serve a self-help function, negotiating shifting structures of identity along with changes in lifestyle, affiliation, values and meanings.

This Introductory chapter sets out the historical, political, literary and cultural contexts for the chapters to follow. It focusses on the role the African National Congress played in South Africa’s transition from apartheid to democracy, paying close attention to the rifts, contradictions and dissonance in the world view and policies of the ruling party. It draws on recent scholarship to better understand the relations between class and race in the new South Africa. The chapter argues that change in South Africa needs to be considered ‘from the inside’, in terms of the ways its cultural features are felt at psycho-social levels. South African literary studies have, it is argued, tended towards a preoccupation with abstract historicity. Through an engagement with the work of Raymond Williams and Njabulo Ndebele, this chapter argues that South African literary criticism needs to shift from a focus on history to one on culture, and from abstraction into a more concrete enquiry into the everyday sociological realities of South Africans.

This chapter seeks to understand why hustling is such a prevalent theme in post-apartheid cultural production. It traces what Raymond Williams calls ‘structures of feeling’ – here, aspiration and frustration – back to the dissonant political economic vision of the ANC. As entry into the middle classes is repeatedly impeded for the poor by lack of structural change, so hustling becomes an ever more enticing mode of self-fashioning. But hustling can also be identified at the other end of the class spectrum, where white and black businessmen alike engage in nefarious practices in the pursuit of riches. Here I examine the stranger-than-fiction examples of Brett Kebble and Joe Modise. I connect the insights of novelists Niq Mhlongo and Carel van der Merwe to the findings of the Zondo Commission of Inquiry into state capture, which exposes the many ways in which corruption and fraud took place during Jacob Zuma’s presidency.

The present chapter studies two contemporary Algerian narratives retelling the medieval rebellion of the Zendj, Black Africans brought as slaves to the marshes of Lower Iraq, who revolted against the power of the Abbasid Caliphate. Considered as the greatest servile insurrection of the medieval Arab-Muslim world, Jamel Eddine Benchecikh’s novel Rose noire sans parfum (1998) and Tareq Teguia’s film Révolution Zenj (2013) revisit this evocative episode in the global history of slavery, merging racial and economic exploitation with religious conflict and the struggle for liberation in an age of empire. The chapter focuses on Benchecikh and Teguia’s creative responses to the silence to which the Zendj have been condemned by the Arabic sources of the time, pointing out the different stylistic paths they take to trace analogies between the Zendj Rebellion and the contemporary forms of oppression, racism, and sectarian strife they witness across Algeria, Iraq, Palestine, and Europe. Expressing the rage of the oppressed, their narratives denounce the inequalities and injustices of the postcolonial and globalized world, investigating their causes while inviting audiences within and outside the Arab World to join in the Zendj’s unconcluded struggle for liberation across the centuries.

From the Georgia Sea Islands to Jamaica to Brazil, enslaved African Muslims precariously re-established textual traditions and networks by writing letters in Arabic and transcribing sacred texts from memory. Bearing witness to their rich and cosmopolitan educational backgrounds, African Muslims in the New World used Arabic literacy to subjectively and objectively overthrow the chains of slavery. They narrated as well as propelled their itinerant diasporic histories through literary and epistolary models, from Scheherazade to al-Hariri, studied in the markets and madrasas of Africa and the Ottoman Empire. Edward Wilmot Blyden, born in the West Indies but resident for the majority of his life in Liberia, engaged deeply with the Islamic culture of the Sahel. He provided extensive documentation about Islam in West Africa, attuned to the ways it was woven together with the Islamic world of the Ottoman Empire and Indian Ocean world. His research and travels frame how future researchers, scholars, and activists would perceive the cosmopolitanism of African Muslims such as Job ben Solomon, Abu Bakr as-Siddiq, and Nicholas Said among many others, and how they sought to re-member their narrative, familial, and sacred ties to Arabic and Islam.

In this chapter, Hesford examines the humanitarian imperatives of contemporary anti-slavery and anti-trafficking campaigns and their calculated appropriations and parasitic logics. She considers in what contexts, under what conditions of visibility and legibility, and in support of what political investments are humanitarian tropes deployed? To better understand the contemporary anti-slavery movement’s perpetuation and parasitic appropriation of humanitarian tropes, Hesford turns to the rhetorical mediation of human trafficking subjects and their stories. Understanding these mediations, she argues, is important because how trafficking subjects and their stories are framed sets the parameters for public recognition and political action.

Traditionally underexplored by historians of modern Iran, over the past few years slavery in Iran has become a recognizable subject of historiographic inquiry. Taking as an example the transmediation of a Persian legend (Dāsh Ākul) into literary fiction, and then film, this chapter explores the limits and contradictions of slavery’s historical recovery. In the cinematic version of Dāsh Ākul, the narrative foe Kākā Rustam wears blackface, reactivating a historical detail lost in Sadeq Hedayat’s famous short story of the same name published forty years prior. In Masūd Kīmīā’ī’s 1971 film, Kākā Rustam’s blackface recalls the fact that he was the child of African slaves, witness to his parents’ brutal murder at the hands of their master. This chapter argues that the various transformations and distortions that occur through the medial transmission of Dāsh Ākul illustrate how distortion is constitutive of, rather than merely contingent to slavery’s archive.