Abstract
This paper attempts to explore liminality in the lives of the post-apartheid ethnicities through Brink᾿s The Rights of Desire. Victor Turner᾿s theory of liminality will be used to enumerate liminal beings and situations. We endeavor to find out how Brink portrays ethnicities in regard to the existing liminal spaces. Ethnicities share a common pain which is the very truth of being a minority. Brink's narrative exemplifies the enmeshed characters within the sociopolitical whirlwind that has thrown the minorities off balance. The present paper comes up with this conclusion that although liminality is supposed to be a temporary phase, it has become an integral component of South Africa and its ethnicities. The seed of apartheid is that deeply planted. It demands a long time for its roots to be perished. Apartheid has just been modernized and not devastated. Consequently, post-apartheid South Africa just like apartheid becomes a communitas or an anti-structured entity in which the political transition of power in 1994 does not change anything in regard to the lives of its ethnicities. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2016.v7n5p287
Highlights
As long as the cornerstones of the ideology remain intact—Group Areas, including the splintering of the country into a chequered map of ‘homelands’ and a staggering program of resettlement; separate education systems; the ‘Immorality’ Act; an entire economy based on exploitation —apartheid will persist
The Rights of Desire relates the life of Ruben Olivier, an antedated retired librarian who is concerned with his subjectivity in the post-apartheid South Africa
The desire to be accepted in South Africa as full citizens is not met and attachment to South Africa becomes the great Object of desire for its minorities
Summary
As long as the cornerstones of the ideology remain intact—Group Areas, including the splintering of the country into a chequered map of ‘homelands’ and a staggering program of resettlement; separate education systems; the ‘Immorality’ Act; an entire economy based on exploitation —apartheid will persist. Liminal human beings are “stripped of status role characteristics” It is asserted that “the attributes of liminality or of liminal personae (“threshold people”) are necessarily ambiguous;” that is to say, “liminal entities are neither here nor there, and they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention and ceremonial.” These liminal beings “have no status, property, insignia, secular clothing indicating rank or role in a kinship system.” the liminal beings acquire a “uniform condition.”. During liminal times reversal occurs in the status of beings, to put it another way, “Liminality implies that the high could not be high unless the low existed, and he who is high must experience what it is like to be low” Liminal beings are not categorized in a particular group In this respect they are called polluting creatures. Tangible instances for all of the characteristics of liminality and their definitions will be offered throughout this paper
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