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Rebuilding the Nation: On Architecture and the Aesthetics of Constitutionalism in South African Literature

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 December 2014

Elizabeth S. Anker
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Abstract

The South African Constitution is widely regarded as one of the world’s most progressive, and this essays looks to a series of novels concerned with the nation’s transition beyond apartheid in order to examine the challenges of transformative constitutionalism. Through readings of Nadine Gordimer’s None to Accompany Me, Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying, and Ivan Vladislavic’s The Folly,1 it explores the prevalence of the language and imagery of architecture in describing national rebuilding and South African constitutional jurisprudence alike. The essay ultimately argues, however, that the architectural metaphor casts post-apartheid recovery as a success story that belies political and economic reality.

Keywords

South Africaconstitutionalismtransitional justicepolitical metaphors
Type
Articles
Information
Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry , Volume 2 , Special Issue 1: Special Issue: Literature and Law , March 2015 , pp. 73 - 91
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2014 

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References

1 Gordimer, Nadine, None to Accompany Me (London: Bloomsbury, 1994)Google Scholar; Mda, Zakes, Ways of Dying: A Novel (South Africa: Oxford University Press Southern Africa)Google Scholar; Vladislavic, Ivan, The Folly (Cape Town, David Philip Publishers, 1993)Google Scholar.

2 Palmer, R. R., The Age of Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America: 1760–1800, 2 Vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959–1964)Google Scholar; Colley, Linda, “Empires of Writing: Britain, America and Constitutions, 1776–1848,” Law and History Review 32.2 (May 2014): 1–30 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Levinson, Sanford, Constitutional Faith (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988)Google Scholar.

4 Ibid., 14.

5 “Introduction,” Limits to Liberation after Apartheid: Citizenship, Governance & Culture, ed. Steven L. Robins (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2005), 2.

6 de Vogue, Ariane, “Ginsburg Likes S. Africa as Model for Egypt,” ABC News, February 3, 2012 Google Scholar.

7 Mutua, Makau, Human Rights: A Political and Cultural Critique (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press: 2002), 126 Google Scholar.

8 Postamble, South African Interim Constitution, 1993. www.polity.org.za/html/govdocs/legislation/1993/constit0.html?rebookmark=1.

9 Comaroff, Jean and Comaroff, John L., “Reflections on Liberalism, Policulturalism and ID-ology,” Social Identities 9.4 (2003): 445–474 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also the tendency to fetishize law within the postcolony as almost “magical.” Comaroff, Jean and Comaroff, John L., “Law and Disorder in the Postcolony: An Introduction,” Law and Disorder in the Postcolony (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 For a powerful statement of skepticism about the success of South African renewal, see the South Atlantic Quarterly 2004 special issue “After the Thrill Is Gone: A Decade of Post-Apartheid South Africa,” coedited by Grant Farred and Rita Barnard. Nelson Mandela’s recent death likewise engendered an outpouring of more cynical assessments of South African post-apartheid recovery and Mandela’s ambivalent role in that process. Zakes Mda, one of the novelists this essay discusses, offers an especially bracing interpretation of Mandela’s legacy. See “Nelson Mandela: Neither Sell-Out nor Saint,” The Guardian, December 6, 2013.

11 See Frederic Jameson’s notorious “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” Social Text 15 (Autumn 1986): 65–88.

12 Relative to the United States context, see Levinson, Constitutional Faith; Balkin, Jack M., Constitutional Redemption (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 Slauter, Eric, The State as a Work of Art: The Cultural Origins of the Constitution (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2009) 41 Google Scholar.

14 See also Slauter.

15 Savage, Katharine, “Negotiating South Africa’s New Constitution: An Overview of the Key Players and the Negotiation Process,” in The Post-Apartheid Constitutions: Perspectives on South Africa’s Basic Law, eds. Penelope Andrews and Stephen Ellmann (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2001): 164–193 Google Scholar. For the complaint that the ANC simultaneously “trafficked in anticapitalist rhetoric during the anti-apartheid struggle” yet “did not reject capitalism in principle,” see Michael MacDonald, “The Political Economy of Identity Politics,” SAQ 103.4 (Fall 2004): 629–56.

16 Ibid., 176–77. Gloppen ultimately concludes that the constitution’s protection of property rights will “hamper radical change,” 236. See also 209, 231.

17 For such a critique, see Farred, Grant, “The Not-Yet Counterpartisan: A New Politics of Oppositionality,” SAQ 103.4 (Fall 2004): 589–606 Google Scholar.

18 Merry, Sally Engle, “Spatial Governmentality and the New Urban Social Order: Controlling Gender Violence through Law,” American Anthropologist 103.1 (March 2001): 16–30 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; “Introduction,” Limits to Liberation after Apartheid: Citizenship, Governance & Culture, ed. Steven L. Robins (Ohio University Press, 2005), 11; see also Werry.

19 Brown, Wendy, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (New York: Zone, 2010), 104 Google Scholar.

20 Ranciere, Jacques, “Who Is the Subject of the Rights of Man?” SAQ 103.2/3 (Spring/Summer 2004): 297–310Google Scholar.

21 Interview with Elizabeth Anker at Cornell University on August 30, 2013. See also Cornell, Drucilla, “A Call for Nuanced Constitutional Jurisprudence,” Ubuntu and the Law: African Ideals and Post-Apartheid Jurisprudence, eds. Drucilla Cornell and Nyoko Muvangua (New York, Fordham University Press, 2012), 329 Google Scholar.

22 Postamble, South African Interim Constitution, 1993.

23 For a comprehensive discussion the dualities of discourses of Ubuntu that in particular examines its role in sports culture, see Mangharam, Mukti Lakhi, “‘Ubuntu Sports Inc.’: The Commodification of Culture in South African and American Sports,” Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies 12.1 (Jan 2011): 27–46 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Mangharam asks whether it serves “as a convenient platitude to appeal to urban youth in attempts to smooth over racial and economic divisions” (41).

24 For a critique of how the rainbow national ideology perpetrates violence and “glosses over the struggle to achieve” citizenship, see Lazarus, Neil, “The South African Ideology: The Myth of Exceptionalism, the Idea of Renaissance,” SAQ 103.4 (Fall 2004), 607–628 Google Scholar.

25 Many thanks to Debjani Ganguly, Ato Quayson, and Neil ten Kortenaar, as well as audiences at Cátolica School of Law, Cornell University, Harvard University, Prague Law School, Sciences Po Law School, and Stanford University, for their generous feedback.