Around the turn of the twentieth century the early phase of ‘transition’ morphed into a sociopolitical category variously described as ‘post-transition’ (Frenkel and MacKenzie, 1–2), ‘post-anti`-apartheid’ (Kruger, ‘Black Atlantics’ 35) and ‘post-postapartheid’ (Chapman, ‘Conjectures’ 15). Kruger's neologism ‘post-anti-apartheid’ signifies a period beyond apartheid, where the writing subject is, at last, delivered from the oppositional stance signified by ‘anti’ – no longer compelled to counter the material effects of the ideology of apartheid, whether by means of plotting, or overall sentiment, be this moral, ethical or political. This sense of remission from the prison house of the past is key to the way the term ‘postapartheid’ has broadly come to be understood: as a deliverance from the constraints – the shackles – of endlessly opposing legislated racism that relied on a succession of states of emergency and a culture of political assassination and torture. Eventually, such oppositional struggle writing had become so repetitive, and so dreary, that Albie Sachs made his call for a provisional ban on the notion of culture as a ‘weapon of the struggle’ in his 1991 ANC working paper, ‘Preparing Ourselves for Freedom’.

Indeed, if there is one common thread in published research on postapartheid South African writing, it is the sense that the country's writing, resisting classification as a result of its ‘unresolved heterogeneity’, has now become even more diverse, as befits its newfound liberty, its deliverance from what one might term the closure of apartheid logocentrism. In keeping with this new script about the literature of postapartheid, Frenkel and MacKenzie propose that ‘scores of writers [in the years 1999–2009] have produced works of extraordinary range and diversity’ (1). These writers have ‘heeded Albie Sachs's call to free themselves from the ‘ghettos of the apartheid imagination’, with ‘new South African literature accordingly [reflecting] a wide range of concerns and styles’ (1). This literature is ‘unfettered to the past, but may still consider it in new ways’ or ‘ignore it altogether’ (2).

Without contradicting Frenkel and MacKenzie, I wish to suggest a line of reasoning that departs from the theme of being ‘freed from the past’. In my view, a significant section of postapartheid literature finds itself less liberated from the past than engaged in the persistent re-emergence of this past.