The question of just how snugly South Africa fits into postcolonial paradigms is a vexed one, much debated in South African literary and cultural theory of the late 1980s and 1990s. By some accounts South Africa has been postcolonial many times over: with the establishment of the Union of South Africa in 1910 in the wake of the Anglo-Boer war; with the triumph of Afrikaner nationalism and the birth of the apartheid state in 1948; and of course, with the historic elections of 1994 that brought Nelson Mandela's ANC-led government to power. The obviously farcical nature of South Africa's first two "independences" places an additional burden on the third, which must be not only genuinely representative of all national constituencies but also temporally decisive. If you listen enough times, as all South Africans who lived through 1990s did, to the phrase "the‘new’South Africa," you cannot help but hear in it a deep and abiding anxiety, a rhetorical disavowal of the unspoken yet ubiquitous presence of the old. Perhaps we may speak then of "postapartheid" in a similar sense to that in which we speak of “postcolonial” or “postnational,” that is, advisedly and with reservation, ever aware of the difficulties and ironies of a prefixed “post” that prematurely announces the passing of a system of domination that actually remains, albeit in residual, reconfigured forms. These remainders include neocolonialism, neoimperialism, and multinational global capitalism for the postcolonial, the ongoing interpellative force and political presence of national identification for the postnational and racialized inequities of all manner for the postapartheid. Part of the burden of a literary-critical engagement with the South African literature of transition must thus be the learning of a kind of methodological oscillation, in which the parsing of newness goes hand in hand with the naming of oldness, in which the exploration of nationalist address goes hand in hand with the mapping of the transnational circuits that inform the nation.

Such a method seeks connection where South African literary criticism has historically sought division. During the 1980s South African literary criticism commonly distinguished two major strains of national literature: a "resistance" strain associated with Sipho Sepamla, Mongane Serote, Mbulelo Mzamane, Mtutuzeli Matshoba, and others that reached back to the Black Consciousness movement of the 1970s and also encompassed the flood of black protest poetry, nationalist prose, and realist“people’s literature”unleashed by the 1976 Soweto uprising; and, on the other hand, a “futurist” or “apocalyptic” largely white strain dedicated to imagining the end of apartheid and epitomized by such political novels as Nadine Gordimer’s July’s People (1981) and, in the different register of the parable or allegory, J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (1981), Life and Times of Michael K (1983), and Foe (1986).4 To his critics, Coetzee’s penchant for allegory implied a concomitant refusal of the historical imagination, a refusal not only of the political here and now but equally of some nascent, struggle-born future. In Gordimer’s view the allegorical form of Coetzee's early novels emerged“out of a kind of opposing desire to hold himself clear of events and the daily, grubby, tragic consequences in which, like everybody else living in South Africa, he is up to the neck, and about which he had an inner compulsion to write...allegory as a stately fastidiousness; or a state of shock.” Even a novel like Life and Times of Michael K—whose story of a deformed, displaced, abandoned man actually names South Africa as its setting unlike the earlier Waiting for the Barbarians, with its nameless, placeless, ahistorical Empire, or the later Foe, with its similarly extranational geography of desert island periphery and English metropole—commanded Gordimer's criticism for its contentment with the play of allegorical symbols and simultaneous "revulsion against all political and revolutionary solutions." Gordimer herself advocated a realist mode for the telling of truth to power. Writing in the explosively riven South Africa of the 1980s, she claimed that the writer's task "can be fulfilled only in the integrity Chekov demanded: 'to describe a situation so truthfully... that the reader can no longer evade it."