Chapter 4 seeks to understand the logic of cultural rehabilitation as it applies to aspects of indigenous belief, knowledge and practice denigrated by colonialism and apartheid. This chapter situates the concept of indigenous knowledge in relation to that of the ‘indigenous resource base’ as formulated by Ato Quayson. Similar to other African writers, authors like Zakes Mda, Thando Mgqolozana and Diale Tlholwe make judicious use of this resource base, incorporating elements of myth, folklore and ritual into their narratives, thereby encouraging recuperation and healing. Recuperative elements in the works of these novelists are, somewhat paradoxically, also linked with a cosmopolitanism sensibility. In the final part of the chapter I consider the varying ways white writers like Brett Bailey, André P. Brink and Marguerite Poland have drawn on African myth, belief and ritual practice for their own purposes.

The third chapter considers political and social change in relation to the embattled white middle class. Through a reading of contemporary crime fiction, especially Deon Meyer, Margie Orford, Mike Nicol and Roger Smith, it argues that middle-class culture has bifurcated into liberal and illiberal strands. These strands can be examined in relation to the negotiation of the rule of law: on the one hand the detective fictions of Orford and Meyer seek, ultimately, to affirm the constitutional order; on the other hand, the noir novels of Smith and Nicol encode a cynical stance, one which understands the social contract to have been irrevocably violated. These positions are then considered in relation to shifts within the Democratic Alliance, the political party most invested in white middle-class concerns.

Chapter 6 returns to questions of identity and citizenship, specifically what ‘South African’ means by contrast with ‘African’. The terms of this conversation have been pre- and over-determined by violent xenophobia, with major outbreaks having taken place across the country in 2008, 2015 and 2019. This chapter pauses on our understanding of the causes of xenophobic violence, especially South African exceptionalism, before considering in more detail the country’s literary responses to the phenomenon. On the one hand, writers like Phaswane Mpe, Patricia Schonstein and Andrew Brown develop strategies for interrogating xenophobic myths and for cultivating sympathy for migrants. However, some of these techniques hinge on questionable assumptions which threaten their humanising goals. Other South African works, like the film District 9 and an early work by Richard Kunzmann, develop explicit xenophobic tropes which can be understood in relation to the domestication of threat and the negotiation of change in South Africa after apartheid.

This book shows how South African writing can help us to understand change after apartheid. It begins with the idea that imaginative writing offers productive, sometimes profound, insight into questions of major concern. It aims to shift the attention of literary criticism away from a narrow set of highbrow South African authors and towards the study of a wider range of texts, including popular fiction. And it exemplifies the benefits of an interdisciplinary approach by honing the focus of the study on specific concepts and topics. The object of analysis, at its largest level, is the South African polity as it veered between the hopeful optimism of the ‘Rainbow nation’ under Nelson Mandela, the murderous muddling of Thabo Mbeki and the ‘captured state’ under Jacob Zuma. Questions of a political, economic and sociological cast are central, with changes in the workplace, land reform, indigenous knowledge, corruption, crime and xenophobia providing specific points of focus. The creative literature of the post-apartheid period has a unique and powerful capacity to illuminate these issues and to intervene in our understanding of them.

There are few issues in South African politics, culture and literature more resonant, more freighted, more emotive, than land. Chapter 5 begins by observing the ongoing centrality of land and ownership, especially in the wake of land reform programmes and populist shifts in political rhetoric. Novels by Anne Landsman, Marlene van Niekerk and Damon Galgut engage in detail with the crucial question of ownership, which is linked to race. They explore connections between the abject, labour and ownership, with the bodily and affective experiences shared by white women farmers and their brown or black workers being central themes of each novel. These novels struggle to articulate answers to the challenges of land reform, but they also foreground intimate gestures of recompense. In relation to the ethics of care, and the practices associated with love, they mark an important beginning of the conversation between the post-apartheid pastoral on the one hand, and land reform on the other.

The second chapter continues the examination of class aspiration, but this time from the point of view of those entering the middle and upper-middle classes. Here government policies of affirmative action and Black Economic Empowerment have borne fruit for some. But the benefits of these policies come with strings attached, for the workplace is often experienced as hostile and unwelcoming. Life in the suburbs, even for the nouveau riche, can be alienating. The key texts studied in this chapter, aided by a wealth of ethnography in this area, are popular romances (Sapphire Press, Nollybooks) and ‘chick lit’ (Zukiswa Wanner, Cynthia Jele) aimed at black female South Africans. These texts, it is argued, serve a self-help function, negotiating shifting structures of identity along with changes in lifestyle, affiliation, values and meanings.

This Introductory chapter sets out the historical, political, literary and cultural contexts for the chapters to follow. It focusses on the role the African National Congress played in South Africa’s transition from apartheid to democracy, paying close attention to the rifts, contradictions and dissonance in the world view and policies of the ruling party. It draws on recent scholarship to better understand the relations between class and race in the new South Africa. The chapter argues that change in South Africa needs to be considered ‘from the inside’, in terms of the ways its cultural features are felt at psycho-social levels. South African literary studies have, it is argued, tended towards a preoccupation with abstract historicity. Through an engagement with the work of Raymond Williams and Njabulo Ndebele, this chapter argues that South African literary criticism needs to shift from a focus on history to one on culture, and from abstraction into a more concrete enquiry into the everyday sociological realities of South Africans.

This chapter seeks to understand why hustling is such a prevalent theme in post-apartheid cultural production. It traces what Raymond Williams calls ‘structures of feeling’ – here, aspiration and frustration – back to the dissonant political economic vision of the ANC. As entry into the middle classes is repeatedly impeded for the poor by lack of structural change, so hustling becomes an ever more enticing mode of self-fashioning. But hustling can also be identified at the other end of the class spectrum, where white and black businessmen alike engage in nefarious practices in the pursuit of riches. Here I examine the stranger-than-fiction examples of Brett Kebble and Joe Modise. I connect the insights of novelists Niq Mhlongo and Carel van der Merwe to the findings of the Zondo Commission of Inquiry into state capture, which exposes the many ways in which corruption and fraud took place during Jacob Zuma’s presidency.

This chapter attempts in brief to rethink the history of magic by considering its relations with otherness. Otherness is conceived of as a relative and dynamic category, generated as the necessary result of claims to truth. The long history of the term 'magic' is characterised throughout by attempts to other it. The chapter pauses on several key moments in this history, ancient and medieval, before considering in slightly more detail the consequences of the Protestant Reformation for the imposition of a modern conception of magic. The rise of science and discourses of objectivity provide impetus for the modern othering of magic, and literature’s role in this process is examined through a focus on the rise of realism. The chapter then shows how the breakdown of consensus about the nature of reality in the early twentieth century leads to new forms of artistic expression, central among which is magical realism. It argues that throughout this long history magic, in a variety of forms, has displayed an extraordinary resilience, retaining its capacity to express important aspects of experience, society and meaning.