The afterlives of a successful revolution: Zakes Mda’s Rachel’s Blue and Jaco van Schalkwyk’s The Alibi Club outside of the global novel

Abstract

This article examines how two recent novels set in the USA but written by South African writers, Zakes Mda and Jaco van Schalkwyk, articulate a new circuitry of relationships across the Atlantic within the frame of cultural flows. This circuitry is not about the national, global, or the post-transitional, it is not about South African or American exceptionalism, but is rather about imagining new spaces and forms of political articulation that bring a post-liberation consciousness to global circuits that resonate with similar inequalities. I contend that the idea that things can be fought over and changed is so endemic to South African cultural life that it has become a sort of everyday common sense or an afterlife of a successful revolution, as the strength of civil society and grass roots political organizations and protests reveals in South Africa of the present. The afterlives of a successful revolution then allow for a recalibration of relationships where catastrophe and its effects are understood globally through writers like Mda and Van Schalkwyk. In this article, the novels under discussion reveal a changed relationship between South Africa and America through the ascension of new flows and circuits that place South African modernity at the center of representations of American trauma.