1. This ‘ethical imperative’, as I have been calling it, is one which has been expanded upon at length in criticism of South African literature, particularly in the work of critics including David Attwell, Derek Attridge and Stephen Clingman. As the introduction to this study indicated, this ethical focus is no doubt in due, at least in part, to the immediacy of representation under apartheid and long-standing debates in South Africa around the role of aesthetic representation under a regime of terror (see, for instance, Lewis Nkosi, Home and Exile (London: Longman, 1965)
2. and J. M. Coetzee, ‘Into the Dark Chamber’, in Doubling the Point, ed. by David Attwell (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 361–8). While certain theoretical insights from these critics will be deployed over the course of this study, literary writing from South Africa remains outside of its remit, given both the positioning of global African literatures as both sub-Saharan and produced by non-white (usually black) authors (a position which I do not necessarily endorse, but which remains the dominant global narrative of African authenticity, writ large) and South Africa’s singular historical trajectory.
3. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 38–9.
4. Thomas Metscher, ‘Literature and Art as Ideological Form’, trans. by Kiernan Ryan, New Literary History, 11.1 (1979), 21–39 (p. 24).
5. Tobin Siebers, ‘Ethics ad Nauseam’, American Literary History, 6.4 (Winter 1994), 756–78 (p. 776).