‘Dizzy with the to-ing and fro-ing’: Diasporic prose of the ‘new South Africa’

Abstract

Engaging with concepts of exilic and transnational writing established by Edward Said, Stephen Clingman, and others, this chapter offers a comparative survey and analysis of a wide range of fiction and nonfiction representing South Africa’s internal and external diasporas, mostly published between 1994, year of its first-ever democratic election, and 2021. A brief overview of the country’s formative immigrations and the internal displacement and external exile created by segregation and apartheid is followed by four sections. The first discusses texts by or about post-liberation returnees, including ex-activists and white expatriates, as well as perspectives from South Africa’s Jewish community and its exiles. The second examines narratives by or about new continental immigrants from the rest of Africa, including refugees, and novels chronicling the intercontinental roots, oceanic routes, and immigrant experiences of South African Indians. The third and fourth sections provide contrasting case studies of revisionist émigrés: J.M. Coetzee, who scrutinizes the migrant’s ‘substitutive’ desire to start afresh; and Zoë Wicomb, whose ‘translocal’ refines the ‘combinatory’ transnational. The chapter argues that identities in the ‘new South Africa’ and its external diasporas are diasporic in diverse and complex ways that challenge and reconfigure the paradigms of ‘contrapuntal’ exile and celebratory cosmopolitanism/Afropolitanism.