The Future in the Post: Utopia and the Fiction of the New South Africa

Abstract

Abstract Post-apartheid South Africa, having recently come into its own in terms of the Utopian national vision that has driven and informed its history, is in danger of assuming this to be the end of its history, with only a better delivery of that static vision being in question. This paper considers the utopian as a vital element in oppositional and revolutionary strategies. It then looks at the important role the future, deployed in a utopian mode, took on in anti-apartheid texts during the darkest period of the liberation struggle, and asks if we can identify a similar impulse in texts that take as their subject some of the less satisfactory aspects of the post-apartheid condition. Focusing on Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow, one of the texts regularly presented as representative of new South African nation, the paper examines post apartheid fiction’s particular avoidance of a nationalised sense of the political. It then places this against the question of the national in relation to the utopian, and argues that the nation is useful to us as an idea if it is always beyond us, always calling the present into question.