ABSTRACT

Early histories of the Cape refer to a remote littoral; uninhabitable land with a difficult terrain and hostile environment. Yet, the Cape Littoral was also described as desirable by the Dutch East India Company for its establishment as a provision fort on the sea route to Asia. This paper examines how two novels published in the post-apartheid present (Kites of Good Fortune (2004) and The Slave Book (1998)), reimagine the inventions of these two simultaneous yet contrasting positions of the Cape Littoral. I show how the representation in Kites of Good Fortune reiterates the construction of the hardships of the Cape Littoral for the colonial administrator and the manumitted slave/descendants, and consequently reproduces the oppressive exploitation of its land and wealth. I use this analysis on the colonial constructions of marginality as a basis to understand how The Slave Book unsettles constructions of inhospitability in its imagination of narratives of patriarchal white desire. The analysis exposes how the novels overlap in their representations of undesirability and hospitability. This discussion considers these narratives as representations of continued forms of violence across the Enlightenment, slavery and colonial eras, and which, through literary representation haunt the post-apartheid present. I deploy re-memory as a metaphor that demands engagement with the structural violence of slavery and colonialism.

摘要

开普敦的早期历史指的是一个偏远的沿海地区；地形复杂、环境恶劣的不适宜居住的土地。然而，滨海角也被荷兰东印度公司描述为可取的，因为它是通往亚洲的海上航线上的供给堡垒。本文考察了在后种族隔离时代出版的两部小说（《好运的风筝》（2004 年）和《奴隶之书》（1998 年））如何重新想象这两个同时发生但又截然不同的滨海角的发明。我展示了如何在好运风筝中的表现重申为殖民管理者和奴隶/后代建造沿海海角的艰辛，并因此再现了对其土地和财富的压迫性剥削。我以这种对边缘化殖民建构的分析为基础来理解《奴隶之书》在其对父权制白人欲望叙事的想象中，扰乱了不适宜居住的结构。分析揭示了小说在表达不受欢迎和好客方面是如何重叠的。本次讨论将这些叙述视为启蒙运动、奴隶制和殖民时代持续暴力形式的表现，并通过文学表现困扰着后种族隔离时代的当下。我将重新记忆作为一个隐喻，要求参与奴隶制和殖民主义的结构性暴力。