Hospitality in Karel Schoeman's Promised Land and Antjie Krog's Country of My Skull

Abstract

Summary This essay places Karel Schoeman's representation of an ethically stunted and uncompromising Afrikaner community in his novel, Promised Land (1978) in counterpoint to Antjie Krog's efforts, in Country of My Skull (1999), to inaugurate a new ethics of representation in response to the demands and opportunities of the post-apartheid dispensation. We relate the two texts by reading them through the lens of Derrida's seminar on the ethics of hospitality. First, we discuss Krog's version of hospitality as an implicit response to the dynamics of moral myopia captured so vividly in Schoeman's dystopian portrait of Afrikanerdom. Second, we address the purported plagiarism in Country of My Skull in the context of the protocols for hosting the voice of the other in those works defined as “creative non-fiction”. In our concluding discussion we shift our attention to the ethical implications of various practices of citation.