Representing the South African Landscape: Coetzee, Kentridge, and the Ecocritical Enterprise*

Abstract

Summary South African artist William Kentridge's Soho Series takes place inside a representation of a Johannesburg mine-landscape. It is a post-industrial and postcolonial landscape of exploitation both of the citizens of the country and of the natural environment. This article considers how the representation of the South African landscape by Kentridge can be seen as part of a continuum of landscape representation in South Africa originating from an initial “wilderness” encounter of a stranger with a new environment. The article traces the movement of landscape representation from those moments when writers and painters, schooled in a particular tradition of representational practices, find themselves forced to create new ways of representing the environment in which they find themselves to a contemporary moment where Kentridge's engagement with landscape representations can be seen as both ecocritical and environmentalist.