Aesthetic revolutions: white South African writing and the State of Emergency

Abstract

The State of Emergency in South Africa, which lasted from 1985 to 1990, presented an unprecedented crisis for white dissident writers. The brutal and systematic violence directed at perceived enemies of the state demonstrated the lengths to which the apartheid regime was willing to go to maintain itself, and made the idea of literature as a politically significant act seem ridiculous – a vestigial remnant of an outdated liberal humanism. Despite their public criticisms of liberal humanism, prominent white South African writers including Andre Brink, J. M. Coetzee, and Nadine Gordimer were themselves branded with this term. Their aesthetic interests were often seen as incompatible with political commitment, an attitude bolstered by Alan Paton's shift from fiction writing after Cry, the Beloved Country (1948) toward politics. Even one of the most prominent black South African novelists, Zakes Mda, declared that the novel is a “luxury” of freedom, a genre better suited to the post-apartheid era than to the political immediacies dictated by the struggle against the apartheid regime. The crisis of relevance experienced by white South African writers became a significant topic for debate among Western European, American, and Canadian academics on postmodernism. Brink and Coetzee were identified as representative figures of a global postmodernism, and their literary works were championed for their purported political relevance. Linda Hutcheon, for instance, cites both authors in her argument that postmodern literature provides a “denaturalizing critique” of ideology.