Towards an ‘Afropolitan Deixis’: Hospitality and ‘You’ and ‘We’ Narration in Phaswane Mpe's Welcome to Our Hillbrow

Abstract

This article foregrounds the spatial politics implicit in the practice of hospitality towards African foreign nationals that Phaswane Mpe addresses in his novel Welcome to Our Hillbrow. Even though critics have frequently emphasized the novel's preoccupation with the idea of hospitality, the notion has not yet been employed as an overall optic through which to read the text's engagement with non-national African migrants. Neither has the novel been analyzed explicitly with reference to narratological scholarship on ‘you’ and ‘we’ narration. My reading focuses on how hospitality towards African migrants is denied, contested and extended in the diverse and complex spatial arenas depicted in the text. I argue that this is achieved in particular through Mpe's innovative deployment of both ‘you’ and ‘we’ narration. Drawing on Fludernik's approach to these narrative forms from the perspective of linguistic deixis and West-Pavlov's theories of ‘postcolonial deiXis’, I suggest that Mpe makes use of what I would tentatively call an ‘Afropolitan deixis’. The pronominal deictic of the title phrase ‘our Hillbrow’, which recurs as a determiner of various place names throughout the novel, is firmly anchored in the local geography of Hillbrow but simultaneously embraces spaces within Africa and across the world. Yet instead of giving rise to a mere celebratory tenor, this understanding of Afropolitanism is tied up with the text's emphasis on the tragic discrepancy between an envisioned hospitality and its absence in the narrative present that comes to the fore in its frequent employment of counterfactuals.