Since the political transition in 1994 South African literary and cultural criticism has bifurcated into two distinctive bodies of work. Two dominant responses have emerged, that is, in relation to the dynamics of political change in the country.

The first bifurcation is an idiom produced by critics both inside and outside the country, which could be characterised as neo-Marxist in inflection. Here, the dominant critical impulse has been to assert continuity with the past, producing a critique based on reiteration and return, and an argument in the name of that which has not changed in the country. Such critics employ categories of race, class, domination and resistance in much the same way as critics had done in the decade or so before. Thus, for example, Herman Wasserman and Shaun Jacobs (2003) acknowledge that ‘certain social configurations have started to shift’ but emphasise that the issues of hegemony, resistance and race that marked an earlier critical idiom need to remain at the centre of our critical investigations and that ‘the reaffirmation of the same identities that in the past were discriminated against require our ongoing critical recognition’. Barbara Harlow and David Attwell (2000, p 2) refer to South Africa as ‘a society whose underlying social relations or even attitudes remain substantially unchanged’. Yet, by the time they were writing, South Africa's black middle class, for example, emerged for the first time as larger than its white middle class, a statistic which contests a stasis in the social structure of South Africa and suggests the emergence of new kinds of imaginaries and practices in the country. Certainly, by the late 1990s neither recent South African fiction nor popular culture suggested social stasis.

Such readings were, to be sure, born in part of what we could refer to as an ethical oppositionality which seeks to register the ongoing ‘agony of the social’ – the continuing inequalities and suffering of many in South Africa since its political transition. This position resonated with a body of work produced during this period by a number of largely ex-South African critics based in the United States and Britain – even while these critics pushed its critical registers somewhat further.