Original scientific paper
South Africa and Bhabha's dissemination in Damon Galgut's The Impostor
Mirela Pal
; Zagreb
Tihana Klepač
; Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb
Abstract
Accepting Stuart Hall’s definition that national identity is a story which negotiates between the so-called return to roots and “a coming-to-terms-with our 'routes,'” the article reveals South Africa described in Damon Galgut’s The Impostor (2008) as a country only beginning this journey, stuck between traumatic events in the pedagogical dimension of the nation (Bhabha) and problems of ethical performance of the nation in the present. It was already Frantz Fanon who wrote about the representation of colonized societies as “societies without values,” which is a narrative rooted deeply in the pedagogical dimension of a nation. In spite of the nation becoming independent, and in spite of the abolition of apartheid, South Africa in Galgut’s The Impostor remains a nation led by brutal materialism, a nation stuck in, to use Galgut’s wording, “ramshackle construction of compromise and half-truths.”
Keywords
Damon Galgut; South Africa; pedagogical and performative of a nation; The Impostor; trauma
Hrčak ID:
289434
URI
Publication date:
29.12.2022.
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