Reading transnational histories

Abstract

In this essay on Zakes Mda’s The Madonna of Excelsior, I consider the constructions of whiteness in the novel and the use of apartheid history to narrate a singular event in South Africa’s past. Central to Mda’s novel are the coloured children whose birth is paralleled by the Immorality miscegenation trials of 1971 in the town of Excelsior. It is Mda’s concern with his own cultural Other which forms the basis for the interaction between the central female characters and the Afrikaner men. Accordingly, the novel satirically inverts the apartheid master narrative. Mda sets out to engage with the complex transnational histories that constitute the formation of Afrikaner identity, and this version of Afrikanerdom is analyzed as a form of the cross-cultural, transnational energies typical of his fiction.