A “Touch of Africa”: liberal bildung through an encounter with African immigrants in Andrew Brown's Refuge

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article engages with the emergence of a “reconstructed liberalism” (Blair 2012) in South African fiction published after 2000 through a reading of Andrew Brown's 2009 novel, Refuge. The novel, I argue, forms part of a body of fiction that views post-apartheid immigration from elsewhere on the African continent to South Africa through a predominantly liberal perspective. Reading Brown's novel through the framework of the liberal Bildungsroman, I show that it is, however, largely the white characters who undergo a positive development through the encounter with Nigerian immigrants and refugees, while no such solution is offered for the migrant characters. Evoking “liberalism's fetishization of victimhood” (Attwell 1993: 80), the novel partly constitutes African migrants as self-validating others. Yet, I also draw attention to the textual strategies employed that undercut any interpretation based on an uncritical adoption of a liberal stance in its engagement with migration. Brown's text productively juxtaposes the main character's embrace of the liberal ideal of a transparent world to one of the migrant characters’ insistence on the unknowability of other human beings.