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Panelist Hetty ter Haar |
Remembering Fanon: Shame and Racial Consciousness in ZoÎ Wicomb’s David’s Story Yianna Liatsos, Department of English, University of Oklahoma
The paper I propose to present in your
conference centers on the topic of the South African coloured identity—those
South Africans designated already in the 19th century but officially
established as a separate racial category by the Nationalist government’s
Population Registration Act of 1950, as belonging to an ancestry that
could be traced back to the native Khoi and San peoples, to slaves
brought to South Africa from Madagascar, Mozambique, India, Indonesia
and Malaysia, and to people of mixed racial origin. Firmly grounded
in the material specificity of the coloured South African historical
experience, Wicomb’s writing exposes the limitations of Homi
Bhabha’s theory regarding the emancipatory potential of the South
African coloured “hybrid,” to depict a far more complex
and confused people who both echo and exceed Frantz Fanon’s critique
of the internalized inferiority complex of the black colonized in Black
Skin/White Masks. I argue that Wicomb’s novel sheds a light of
clarification onto the limitations of a politics of historical catharsis
that the post-apartheid sought to instill in the new South African
political consciousness through the institution of the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission hearings, first by employing Fanon’s critical insights
into the psychological and historical damage that a marginalized racial
consciousness embodies, and then by critically reflecting on the implications
of making the racialized body belonging to such a wounded consciousness
that of a coloured woman.
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