Beyond South Africa and the Politics of Realism

Abstract

Abstract This chapter uses Zoë Wicomb’s theoretical essays as a starting point to comment on her two short-story cycles You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town (1987) and The One that Got Away (2008). It reads the author’s short fiction through the notions of setting and intertextuality, or rather setting as intertextuality. This final chapter argues that Wicomb’s aesthetic practice—intertextuality, metafiction, retellings, uncanniness—stages (ethically) infinite gestures of repetition that resist any essentialist and monolithic interpretations, giving space to the narratives of minor, marginalized voices. She thus discards both the construction of ethnic identities (inherent in the rhetoric of apartheid and the new Rainbow Nation) and acts of generic classification.