Psychic Unhomings, Amnesia, and the Risk of Decosmopolitanization in Damon Galgut’s The Impostor (2008)

Michela Borzaga

doi:10.3390/h9030105

Abstract

The apartheid regime has left behind a range of chronic and structural disturbances of home/lands in contemporary South Africa. This article examines the representation of housing in Damon Galgut’s The Impostor. In this post-apartheid novel, houses feature prominently; they are not only the axle around which the plot revolves, but characters in their own right. Houses are depicted as relational and dynamic sites, invested with traumatic repressed material. By drawing on critical house studies, psychoanalysis, memory, and postcolonial studies, it will be shown that there is a strong intersection that needs to be unpacked between inhabited spaces, the mnemonic economy of the self, its displacements and unexpected flights, and the larger socio-economic and political sphere. This article argues that houses in Galgut’s novel emerge as psychological and affective contents, as symptoms of historical amnesia and displaced whiteness; characters’ psychic disturbances find fertile terrain in a country which, while parading itself as “new” and “open”, risks regressing towards new forms of “decosmopolitanization” (Appadurai).

Highlights

The apartheid regime has left behind a range of chronic and structural disturbances of home/lands in contemporary South Africa
This article argues that houses in Galgut’s novel emerge as psychological and affective contents, as symptoms of historical amnesia and displaced whiteness; characters’ psychic disturbances find fertile terrain in a country which, while parading itself as “new” and “open”, risks regressing towards new forms of “decosmopolitanization” (Appadurai)
By drawing on critical house studies, psychoanalysis, memory, and postcolonial studies, I want to argue that there is a strong intersection that needs to be unpacked between inhabited spaces, the mnemonic economy of the self, its displacements and unexpected flights, and the larger socio-economic and political sphere

Summary

Introduction

The apartheid regime has left behind a range of chronic and structural disturbances of home/lands in contemporary South Africa. The idea here is that the weeds metaphorically represent or symbolically stand for the messiness of Adam’s life; the above material description is metonymic of Adam’s own intra-psychic conflict, the split between, on the one hand, the delusional fantasy he nourishes of being a naturalist poet in the wilderness in contact with an unburdened, halcyon time and, on the other, his unknown double, Adam’s own impenetrable affective wall—traces of past wounds which he struggles to name but return to haunt him, hindering his creative writing.

Results

Conclusion