![]() ![]() I argue that this ambivalence drives a fetishistic disavowal that can be symptomatically read in the trope of the island and its meaning in South Africa at the time. Yet, it is perhaps this anxiety around exclusion from the world that sharpened the edge of the state’s paranoia regarding what its inclusion in that world might look like. From the apartheid state’s perspective, international sanctions and boycotts chimed with its sense of abandonment, a narrative made-to-fit for the imperial romance of the desert island survivor. It is little surprise that the trope of the island emerges so often as a rhetorical shorthand to describe the isolationism of the South African state during apartheid. ![]() ![]() As such, I argue, they de-territorialize apartheid and read it as folded-together ( com- plic- it, in Mark Sander’s sense) 6 in its global moment. Both texts refuse a reading of apartheid as neatly sealed within South Africa’s national boundaries. These text-which I argue thematize South African economic and moral isolation through the trope of the island-engage the moral conditions of life under apartheid within a distinctly transnational frame. 5 In this paper, I aim to analyze two differently extraverted South African fictions: Athol Fugard, John Kani and Winston Ntshona’s The Island (1973) and J.M. ![]() Yet, South African literature under apartheid was also “extraverted,” which is to say, to apply Jean-Francois Bayert’s sense of the term, it was literature not only for the world but also of it. Eileen Julien, describing a trend in African fiction, whereby African novels “speak outward and represent locality to nonlocal others,” calls such writing “extroverted.” 3 Unlike today’s extroverted African fictions, however, which are in danger of effacing narrative representations of African everyday life, extroverted fiction from apartheid South Africa was expressly aimed at raising global awareness of the plight of black South Africans living under that regime. As such, much of the anti-apartheid writing produced in South Africa during apartheid was intended for a global readership. Many writers felt morally obliged to galvanize local and international support for the anti-apartheid movement by telling the stories that were otherwise suppressed by state censorship. This ambivalence was reflected by much of the country’s fiction written at the time. Was Cruso free, that was despot of an island all of his own? 2Apartheid South Africa had an anxious and ambivalent relationship to the world, being at once isolated via internal censorship and international sanctions and, at the same time, longing for full participation in global trade, technology, and culture. ![]()
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