Abstract
his article engages with the emergence of a “reconstructed liberalism” (Blair
2012) in South African fiction published after 2000 through a reading of Andrew
Brown’s 2009 novel,
Refuge. The novel, I argue, forms part of a body of fiction
that views post-apartheid immigration from elsewhere on the African continent
to South Africa through a predominantly liberal perspective. Reading Brown’s
novel through the framework of the liberal
Bildungsroman
, I show that it is,
however, largely the white characters who undergo a positive development
through the encounter with Nigerian immigrants and refugees, while no such
solution is offered for the migrant characters. Evoking “liberalism’s fetishization
of victimhood” (Attwell 1993: 80), the novel partly constitutes African migrants
as self-validating others. Yet, I also draw attention to the textual strategies
employed that undercut any interpretation based on an uncritical adoption of
a liberal stance in its engagement with migration...