Apocalypse now, never ... or forever : Venter and Medalie on the everyday politics of post-apartheid South Africa

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Authors

West-Pavlov, Russell B.

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Routledge

Abstract

This article undertakes an analysis of the narrative temporalities and of the narratives of temporality, specifically those of apocalypse or end-times and of living-on respectively, to be found in two recent South African novels, Eben Venter’s Trencherman (2008) and David Medalie’s The Shadow Follows (2006). Against Venter’s hyperbolic narrative of catastrophe, which also turns out to be a critique of the residual elements of the erstwhile apartheid era, I posit that Medalie’s litotic and patchwork narrative offers a more appropriate narrative of the slow transformation of the post-apartheid South African polity. I use Venter’s and Medalie’s oddly complementary novels as a template for exploring an emergent sense of a non-teleological ‘minor narrative’ of liberation in a time ‘after postcoloniality’.

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Keywords

Anti-teleology, Catastrophism, Futurity, Post-apartheid, Post-post colonialism, Temporality, South Africa (SA)

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Citation

Russell West-Pavlov (2015) Apocalypse Now, Never … or Forever: Venter and Medalie on the Everyday Politics of Post-Apartheid South Africa, English Studies in Africa, 58:1,42-55, DOI: 10.1080/00138398.2015.1045160