On Laughter, the Grotesque, and the South African Transition: Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying

Abstract

In his agenda-setting book Post colonialism: Theory, Practice, or Process?, Ato Quayson bypasses tedious issue of exact dating of moment and supposed rupture term implies by calling for an anticipatory critical practice: which recognizes that condition it names does not yet exist, while working to bring that condition into (9). The critic's task, he argues, is to postcolonialize, to align himself or herself with an ongoing struggle against colonialism and its aftereffects. While oriented to future, this work-in-progress requires a complex sense of historical configurations. It must be attentive to dialectical interrelation of residual and emergent, to ways in which the dying and the being born may be reconstellated to produce new perspectives and realities (16). If this project is Utopian, it is also mindful of despair and misery that has so often been lot of colonized world, and of Africa in particular. The postcolonial, as Quayson puts in one of most revealing passages in book, is almost a palpable affect. When we consider deplorable stories from continent that incessantly accost us in newspaper and on television and internet (the hanging of Ken SaroWiwa, murderous violence in Algeria, or, more recently, that in Liberia and Darfur), the two domains of pain and discourse seem impossible to separate completely (46). Thus postcolonial studies (more so than other fields of literary and cultural scholarship, in Quayson's view) would seem to demand an urgent ethical response. To say this is not to jettison theoretical sophistication or textual play in favor of some sort of grim realism. On contrary: it is no accident that Quayson's