Reflecting on Anglophone (Post)Apartheid Literature Beyond 2000: A ‘World-Literary’ Perspective

Abstract

Anglophone South African Literature after 2000 has, Michael Chapman, argues, both quantitatively and qualitatively departed from South Africa’s literary output in the preceding decade. This development has been tentatively labelled as the beginning of the ‘post-transitional’ phase within South African Literature by Ronit Frenkel and Craig MacKenzie. Conceiving of it as a temporal marker rather than an artistic movement, they describe the post-transitional writing as one ‘which is often unfettered to the past in the way that much apartheid writing was, but may still reconsider it in new ways. Equally it may ignore it all together’ (2010:2). While Frenkel and McKenzie identify an aesthetic/stylistic shift, Margaret Lenta observes that authors of this new wave have broadened the understanding of ‘South Africanness’ by not shying away from formerly tabooed topics, such as intercultural and same-sex relationships or the marginalisation of women. We suggest a more panoptic view by adopting a 'world-literary' approach. We opt for a (more) ‘distant close reading’, where ‘distant’, as suggested by Franco Moretti, involves the engagement with, or reading of, a greater number of texts under the auspices of various thematic and formal aspects. In order to do so, we follow the Warwick Research Collective in its theorisation of World-Literature as ‘the Literature of the world-system – of the modern capitalist world-system’ (2015: 8).