Adapting the national imaginary: shifting identities in three post‐1994 South African novels*

Abstract

This article investigates the contribution of imaginative writing (specifically, recent novels by Coetzee, Wicomb, Duiker and Langa) to the formation of notions of national identity, or their rejection, in post‐1994 South Africa. Dipesh Chakrabarty has urged writers of history to become aware of the collusion involved in subsuming alternative forms of solidarity to a nationalist master‐narrative. His is an apposite expression of some of the pressures – both political and cultural – to which the three texts mainly dealt with here (by Wicomb, Duiker and Langa) are possible, and different, responses. After an introductory section in which contemporary international notions of nationalism are brought to bear on one another, the discussion moves to consider the South African expression of these broad patterns. Specific local literary examples (in recent prose texts) depict fictional South African considerations of the possibility of this society being a postcolonial nation‐in‐formation ‘of a special kind’.