Politics/Activism and Fiction

Abstract

In an essay entitled “Literature as Cultural Opposition,” South African novelist André Brink observes that while the “political novel … is a very specific kind of novel” in the United States and Europe, in places like South Africa where “ everything has a political implication,” it is virtually impossible for a novel to be anything but political (1996, 186–7). Using the analogy of a sliding scale between the two extremes of l'art pour l'art and littérature engagée , Brink suggests that a text or author's degree of political engagement “would be determined simply by the point on that scale where one happens to find oneself at that given moment and/or by the manner in which the tension between the two extremes on the connecting line is activated” (187). Although it is, arguably, an oversimplification, Brink's image of degrees of political engagement tied to particular temporal and political contexts is nevertheless useful for framing a discussion of the ways in which anglophone and postcolonial fiction in the twentieth century variously met with, responded to, forcefully opposed, and, at times, attempted to distance itself from the political. Brink's image does point to an immediate difficulty, however – nearly all fiction produced in postcolonial contexts is, in some sense, political or has political implications, whether deliberate or not. However, a number of works and authors stand out in their engagements with the political, and those that push toward the extremes of Brink's sliding scale most clearly demonstrate the complex potential and limitations of involving fiction in political activism or political activism in fiction.