Abstract
Zoë Wicomb’s You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town (1987) uses bodily and material waste to figure larger social processes of marginalization, dispossession, and racial abjection during the apartheid era. As the apartheid regime sought to devalue the lives of those categorized as “Black” and “Coloured,” while simultaneously profiting from their land and labor, it pushed non-white South Africans into dangerous proximity to hazardous and unseemly waste. Waste, in You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town, becomes both metonymy and metaphor. Wicomb not only uses it to index the historical and material processes of abjection that obtained in twentieth-century South Africa; she also takes up garbage, feces, vomit, and other refuse as an ethical lens for the consideration of how individual and collective subjectivities are formed by what is thrown away. In its relationship to waste of all kinds, the individual body becomes a site in which social processes of acceptance and disavowal play out.
Highlights
Ian Whittington [Note: This is the author’s original version of the final accepted essay, and does not reflect some minor changes made prior to publication
Midway through Zoë Wicomb’s 1987 work You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town, Frieda Shenton and her family gather dockside to bid farewell to Frieda’s Great Uncle Hermanus, as he prepares to board a ship bound for Canada
As “Coloured” South Africans during the apartheid era, the Shentons understand emigration as freedom bought at the cost of great distance from one’s relations and community
Summary
Ian Whittington [Note: This is the author’s original version of the final accepted essay, and does not reflect some minor changes made prior to publication.
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
