Two of South African literature’s best-known titles from the turn of the twenty-first century are works of campus fiction that rarely get recognized as such. In this article I read J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999) and Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow (2001) as novels whose figuration of the university is far more central to their treatment of the contradictions and ambiguities that characterize postapartheid South Africa than is generally acknowledged. In the course of narratives that seem largely focused on other things, these texts offer up a distinctly South African but also distinctly postcolonial variety of campus fiction, and a critical engagement with the neoliberal university and the conditions under which upward mobility and intellectual inquiry take shape in the twenty-first-century global south. Coetzee and Mpe suggest capacious and transformative, if also deeply ambivalent, ways of imagining an as-yet unrealized decolonial future for universities.

21 世纪初，南非文学界最著名的两部作品都是校园小说作品，但很少得到这样的认可。在这篇文章中，我阅读了 JM Coetzee 的Disgrace (1999) 和 Phaswane Mpe 的Welcome to Our Hillbrow（2001 年）作为小说，其大学形象在他们处理种族隔离后南非的矛盾和模棱两可方面比普遍承认的要重要得多。在似乎主要关注其他事物的叙述过程中，这些文本提供了一种明显的南非但也明显的后殖民校园小说，以及与新自由主义大学的批判性接触以及向上流动和知识探究形成的条件在二十一世纪的全球南方。Coetzee 和 Mpe 提出了一种广阔的、变革性的（如果也是非常矛盾的）方式来为大学想象一个尚未实现的非殖民化未来。