Abstract
The trend in recent literary analyses of postapartheid South African literature is to see a body of writing that is “freed from the past,” exhibiting a wide range of divergences from earlier, “struggle” writing. This article provides an alternative conceptualization of “transitional” and “post-transitional” South African literature, arguing that some of its key dynamics are founded in what is here conceived as “mashed-up temporalities.” The analysis borrows from Ashraf Jamals’ appropriation of art historian Hal Foster’s concept of a “future anterior” or a “will have been.” In this reading, emblematic strands of postapartheid writing are less “free from the past” than trading in an anxiety about never having begun. The body of literature in question – in this case white post-transitional writing – can be seen to be inescapably bound to the idea of the time of before, so much so that it compulsively iterates certain immemorial literary tropes such as the frontier and the journey of discovery. Further, the article suggests that much postapartheid literature written in what it calls “detection mode” – providing accounts of “crime” and other social ills – are distinguished by disjunctive continuity rather than linear or near-linear discontinuity with pre-transition literature, yet exhibit features of authorial voice and affect that place it within a distinctly postapartheid zone of author-reader interlocution.