Occasion for Reflection (Critical Essay‪)‬

Michael Chapman's review of my volume Skin tight: apartheid literary culture and its aftermath (Unisa/Brill 2006) provides an interesting occasion for self-reflection. My emphasis here does not fall on the question of whether or not I am able to recognise my book in the account Chapman gives of it. Rather it seems more useful to engage with some of the collective concerns that tacitly inform his response. What are the underlying commitments of South African literary history, historiography or scholarship, more generally? What is the object of our shared pursuit--to the extent that our objects and objectives are, indeed, shared? Chapman's reading of my work prompts two interrelated speculations. The first concerns an exaggerated anxiety in the face of theory that is, in fact, sedimented into the very constitution of South African literary studies in its local formations. To this extent, Chapman's evident chagrin is less a response to my book than symptomatic of the trajectories which the book analyses, although I should add immediately that 1 refuse to position myself as having provided an institutional historiography of the field. On the evidence that Chapman produces, South African literary studies continues in some quarters to take comfort in its belatedness. This despite the fact that shifts within the theoretical humanities--I am thinking here primarily of the ascendancy of cultural studies, gender and queer theory--have profoundly altered the forms of knowledge which can be presumed to animate our analysis in advance of any given intervention. Secondly, Chapman's reliance on the copula 'is'--in the telltale construction 'South Africa is' and its variant 'South Africa remains'--serves to reiterate the residually positivist epistemology which has informed South African literary studies in the past, whether in its liberal humanist, revisionist historical, or Marxist inscriptions. I have made this point before (Bethlehem 2001). The present book amplifies it. But to draw attention to what we stand to lose when, for instance, literary scholarship surrenders prematurely to the claims which its realist object makes for itself is not to endorse the suggestion that a new 'stage' of literary scholarship will now ensue. Chapman is right. I have no interest in an evolutionary model of literary history, or in what Brian McHale and Randall Stevenson have, on the dust jacket of their Edinburgh companion to twentieth-century literatures in English, bitingly termed '[the] usual forced march through the decades, genres and national literatures' (2006). My work prioritises performativity over teleology. It is congruent with emergent models of literary history based not on 'coverage', but on what McHale and Stevenson call 'involution, revealing literary works' involvement with and situatedness within the material cultures, societies and histories which produced them' (2006: 5). With one important qualification: the innovation that my book brings to bear is the innovation of displacement. Skin tight deliberately sets aside traditional models of literary criticism which focus on a canon of South African writers in order to analyse instead the second-order (literary critical or literary historical) narratives that came into being alongside the emergence of a South Africanist literary studies in the mid-1970s. Through focusing on the repudiated dimension of the scholars' own narrative employment, their use of figure and of literary topos, I show how the foundational texts of the new South African literary studies are implicated within repressed narratives that are themselves fundamental to colonial, pre-apartheid and apartheid governance. The continuities that become visible as a result of this re-description contribute less to literary historical stratification than to an understanding of the skeins of desire enacted between gendered and racialised bodies caught in unequal power relations. The friction that my book creates between texts and b