South African representations of “America”

Abstract

This special issue considers literature that has recourse to the ambivalent agency of a “national” condition outside of its place of production. In particular, it explores American-themed South African literature, with a particular focus on changing cultural patterns within a context of transnational flows. This special issue highlights conduits between South Africa and the United States that circulate cultural and political influence across and through places, forms, categorizations, and texts. Each article examines how literature can open circuits between affective alignments, histories, infrastructures, economies and importantly, political imaginaries of lived spaces in different time periods. This issue does not argue for a theory of replication between South Africa and America but rather works to develop analytical tools to highlight the transnational connections that create layers of resonant meaning while at the same time circulating “untranslatable” sense between South Africa and the United States. Each of the texts under discussion in this issue offers a rich meditation on transnational histories of raciology, global popular cultural flows, the destabilization of the specificities of place, and the resonant aspirations of the ordinary. The writers under discussion include Richard Rive, Langston Hughes, Maurice Evans, CA Davids, Patrick Flanery, Zakes Mda, Jaco van Schalkwyk, and Lauren Beukes. Each inhabits a global space where local history and cosmopolitan configurations combine seamlessly at times, while at other moments, reveal the paradoxes of what might be called global capital’s “parochialism of the authentic” as defined through official discourses of national or even cosmopolitan belonging.