‘Minor disorders’: Ivan Vladislavić and the devolution of South African English

Abstract

This article argues that Ivan Vladislavić's aesthetically radical fictions interrogate the authority of English as a language imposed by colonialism and globalisation. Diverging from the romantic legacy of English letters in South Africa, which has seen literature as an ideal expression of an inner truth, Vladislavić's writing deals with the materiality of the sign and, more specifically, the print medium. In his latest, hilarious novel, The Restless Supermarket, the ironical tension between the perception of English as an ideal order and the shape‐shifting materiality of the sign produces what I (following Deleuze) call a minoritisation of English. However, Vladislavić targets not only the high cultural authority of British English, but equally the instrumentalised English of advertising and commercial media. As he ludically reshuffles and defamiliarises the conventions of both ‘high’ and ‘low’ language, Vladislavić places South African English in the larger flow of transnational history and enables language to function as a mode of becoming rather than being.