Race, Nation, Translation

South African writer and intellectual Zoë Wicomb, known both for her intelligent, ironic fiction and sharp scholarly essays, has recently released a collection of some of her most important work entitled Race, Nation, Translation: South African Essays, 1990–2013. The comprehensive collection is edited by Andrew van der Vlies. In addition to a large selection of her essays and scholarly work, the collection also contains an interview with Wicomb conducted by van der Vlies. Wicomb was born and raised in South Africa, but she lives in Scotland since the 1970s. This dual belonging is reflected in her fiction as several of her novels are set in or connected to Scotland in some way. Her scholarly work has mainly been focused on colored identity, apartheid, and its legacy, as well as on South African literature.The collection opens with an introduction written by van der Vlies, where he aims to “expand on the contexts, personal and political, that frame [Wicomb's] important body of criticism” (9). The introduction achieves just that, and thereby renders Wicomb's essays more accessible to readers who might be more unfamiliar with the topics explored. The informative introduction also echoes some of the thoughts and ideas that van der Vlies has explored in his own recent book; Present Imperfect: Contemporary South African Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). In Present Imperfect, van der Vlies notes how the hopes for Desmond Tutu's multiracial democracy, the “Rainbow Nation”, were running high in connection to the first postapartheid elections in 1994, but that they have yet to come to fruition. Present Imperfect “develops from [his] sense that disappointment is a significant structure of feeling in contemporary South Africa” and that it as such “should also be understood as a temporal condition” (viii). Van der Vlies foregrounds this idea also in his introduction to Race, Nation, Translation when he writes: Many commentators have observed that the young people engaging in protest are no longer inclined to wait, as their parents may have been, for the change that was promised by the antiapartheid struggle, for the fulfillment of what the African National Congress (A.N.C.) promised in 1994. Wicomb has consistently anticipated this impatience and the dangers of disappointment that all recognize is now close to becoming a national structure of feeling in the country. (6) There is thus definitely a tangible resonance present between Wicomb's body of work and van der Vlies' own; intellectual areas where he has been noticeably inspired by her thoughts and ideas concerning postapartheid South Africa. However, this resonance also enables van der Vlies to engage with Wicomb and her work in a way that might not otherwise be possible, as exemplified in the interview at the end of the collection, which I will return to shortly.Wicomb's collection Race, Nation, Translation is divided into three sections, entitled “Hearing the Variety of Discourses,” “Intertextuality and the Postcolonial Author,” and “Interview,” respectively. The first section, “Hearing the Variety of Discourses,” contains Wicomb's earlier work, produced during the years just before and after the end of apartheid in 1994. It contains, as hinted at by the section title, her important essay “To Hear the Variety of Discourses” (1990), as well as fundamental contributions to the discussions about apartheid, its end, and colored identity in South Africa. Such essays include “Culture Beyond Color? A South African Dilemma” (1993) and “Shame and Identity: The Case of the Coloured in South Africa” (1995/1998), where Wicomb aims “to find a way of discussing the textual construction, ethnographic self-fashioning, and political behavior of coloureds in South Africam which is to say our condition of postcoloniality, through the concept of shame” (115).The second section of the book comprises some of Wicomb's essays on literature, selected on the basis of a South African focus. This becomes evident when considering that other essays such as “Heterotopia and Placelessness in Brian Chikwava's Harare North” (in M. Palladino and J. Miller (eds.), The Globalization of Space: Foucault and Heterotopia, London: Pickering & Chatto, 2015: 49-64) have been omitted. This section displays the width of Wicomb's scholarly range as it includes her insightful essays on a wide array of literature by well-known South African authors such as J. M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, and Bessie Head.The final section in the book contains, as previously mentioned, an interview with Wicomb conducted by van der Vlies in 2016 and 2017. This is the most interesting addition to the collection as it provides insight into Wicomb's thoughts both about herself as a scholar and her past work, as well as to Wicomb as a person. Prompted by van der Vlies's questions, the interview opens with Wicomb's account of her own history, beginning with her emigration from South Africa to the United Kingdom in January 1970. While mainly centered on her life, work and career, the interview also offers a rare glimpse into the personal side of Wicomb and the woman behind the razor-sharp scholarship. She touches on her difficulty with public speaking with which she has wrestled all her life. She also recalls how in the early stages of her career as an academic, her teaching became “the single most important factor in [her] intellectual development” as she had to read vast amounts of literature in order to be able to teach (263). Notwithstanding the comprehensive range of topics covered in the interview, an issue that is curiously missing from the conversation taking place in this chapter is gender. As gender is foregrounded and interwoven both in essays included in the collection as well as in several of her novels, bringing up this topic in the interview could have provided crucial context to and insight into Wicomb's work.Wicomb's collection Race, Nation, Translation: South African Essays, 1990–2013 edited by van der Vlies should be of great interest for scholars of South African literature. However, it will also be relevant to, for example, historical scholars with an interest in the history of coloreds. While the collection does not encompass all of Wicomb's work, it does contain her most important contributions with a clear South African focus

Archaeology and Rock Art Studies · Philosophy · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · South African History and Culture