Abstract
This study investigates how same-sex sexualities are represented in several postapartheid cultural texts, and how these representations mark distinct encounters between the transnational and the local. I trace how both historical and contemporary cultural flows exceed both the imaginary and physical boundaries of the national, and intersect with local racial politics to shape postapartheid same-sex public cultures. I develop the notion of restless mobilities to describe the uneven movement and transformations of ideology, aesthetics, affect, and form within global economies of cultural exchange. As I show, historical and contemporary cultural flows co-circulate in complex ways that shape the very constitution of the local in these texts. In particular, I am interested in how these cultural flows map onto postapartheid configurations of race, class, and gender during the production and circulation of these same-sex imaginaries, which are simultaneously rooted and transnational. My focus on restlessness opens up new ways of thinking about South Africa’s locatedness in the vast and uneven global networks of circulation. Restlessness refers to the different ways in which transnational cultural forms negotiate meaning within and between local sites, how ideological and political forms are inhabited differently in different spaces, and how different discourses are transformed in the production of local same-sex public cultures. First, I explore the mobility of global human rights discourses and identity politics, as they reveal both solidarities and discontinuities between the global sexual rights agenda and the antiapartheid movement. Secondly, I trace the power of transnational whiteness as a normative structure of privilege that maps historical connections and forges new ones in the production and circulation of particular white, gay imaginaries. Then, I consider the history of the black female body, as well as its multiple (dis)articulations of victimhood in the present. Finally, I analyse two novels by diasporic Indian writers whose works reflect the confluence of multiple competing transnational imaginaries. These two novels explore the making and unmaking of cultural ‘authenticity’ and sexual otherness within South African Indian communities. This thesis moves across different geographic sites, histories, and forms of ideology and identity. It also traverses several textual genres that include fiction, drama, a documentary film, photography, and a popular magazine. The fiction comprises four novels: Michiel Heyns’s The Reluctant Passenger (2003) and Lost Ground (2011), Shamim Sarif’s The World Unseen (2001), and Zinaid Meeran’s Saracen at the Gates...
D.Litt. et Phil.