Cosmopolitanism and Fictions of “Terror”: Zoë Wicomb's David's Story and Ishtiyaq Shukri's The Silent Minaret

Abstract

With the end of apartheid, cultural commentators anticipated new directions in South African fiction that would place its narratives on a world stage, taking account of global concerns. The portrayal of “terror” is one such example. Yet in contemporary South African fictions of “terror”, this paper argues, postcolonial narratives embed anxieties that profoundly tie the local to the global. Indeed, in the two South African novels explored here, Zoë Wicomb's David's Story (2001) and Ishtiyaq Shukri's The Silent Minaret (2006), the cosmopolitan or “worldly” ethos both authors employ is firmly rooted in local contexts in order to expose strategically decontextualized and obscurantist twentieth-century and contemporary State “terror” rhetoric. Through narrative forms that convey a cosmopolitan worldview, these novels refuse to foreclose important questions that connect the colonial past with the “terror” rhetoric of today.