Blackbourn Veronica a 20101
The Beloved and Other Monsters: Biopolitics and the Rhetoric of Reconciliation in Post-1994 South African Literature by Veronica A. Blackbourn A thesis submitted to the Department of English Language and Literature In conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Queen‘s University Kingston, Ontario, Canada (December, 2010) Copyright © Veronica A. Blackbourn, 2010 Abstract This dissertation examines the use of inter-racial relationships as emblems of political reconciliation in South African fiction from and about the transition from apartheid to democracy. Positive representations of the relationships that apartheid prohibited would seem to constitute a rejection of apartheid itself, but through an analysis of novels by Lewis DeSoto, Elleke Boehmer, Zoë Wicomb, Marlene van Niekerk, Ivan Vladislavić, and J.M. Coetzee, I argue that the trope of the redemptive inter-racial relationship in fact reinscribes what Foucault would designate a biopolitical obsession with race as a foundational construct of the nation. Chapter 2 examines an attempt to write against the legacy of apartheid by repurposing the quintessentially South African genre of the plaasroman, but Lewis DeSoto‘s A Blade of Grass (2003) fails to reverse the narrative effects created by the plaasroman structure, implicated as the plaasroman is and has been in a biopolitical framework. Chapter 3 examines Elleke Boehmer‘s rewriting of South African history to insist on the genealogical ―truth‖ of the racial mixing of the country and its inhabitants, but Bloodlines (2000) yet retains the obsession with racial constructs that it seeks to dispute. Zoë Wicomb‘s Playing in the Light (2006), meanwhile, invokes genealogical ―truth‖ as a corrective to apartheid constructions of race, but ultimately disallows the possibility of genealogical and historical narratives as correctives rather than continuations of apartheid.
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