{"id":18623,"date":"2011-12-01T04:13:15","date_gmt":"2011-12-01T04:13:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=18623"},"modified":"2012-03-24T18:52:30","modified_gmt":"2012-03-24T18:52:30","slug":"playing-in-the-dark-playing-in-the-light-coloured-identity-in-the-novels-of-zoe-wicomb","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=18623","title":{"rendered":"Playing in the dark\/ playing in the light: Coloured identity in the novels of Zo\u00eb Wicomb"},"content":{"rendered":"

Playing in the dark\/ playing in the light: Coloured identity in the novels of Zo\u00eb Wicomb<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa<\/a>
\nVolume 20, Issue 1<\/a>, 2008
\npages 1-15
\nDOI: 10.1080\/1013929X.2008.9678286<\/a><\/p>\n

J. U. Jacobs<\/strong>, Senior Professor of English and Fellow
\nUniversity of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa<\/em><\/p>\n

Zo\u00eb Wicomb’s<\/a> three fictional works\u2014You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town<\/em> (1987), David’s Story<\/em> (2000) and Playing in the Light<\/em> (2006)\u2014all engage with the question of a South African \u2018coloured<\/a>\u2019 identity both under apartheid with its racialised discourse of black and white, and in the context of the post apartheid language of multiculturalism and creolisation. This essay examines the representation of \u2018colouredness\u2019 in Wicomb’s writing in terms of the two different conceptions of cultural identity that Stuart Hall<\/a> has defined: an essential<\/em> cultural identity based on a single, shared culture, and the recognition that cultural identity is based not only on points of similarity, but also on critical points of deep and significant difference<\/em> and of separate histories of rupture and discontinuity. The politics of South African \u2018coloured\u2019 identity in Wicomb’s works reveals a tension between, on the one hand, acceptance of the complex discourse of colouredness with all its historical discontinuities, and, on the other, the desire for a more cohesive sense of cultural identity, drawn from a collective narrative of the past. In David’s Story<\/em> the possibility of an essential cultural identity as an alternative to the unstable coloured one is considered with reference to the history of the Griqua<\/a> \u2018nation\u2019 in the nineteenth century. And in Playing in the Light<\/em> the alternative to colouredness is examined with reference to those coloured people under apartheid who were light enough to pass for white and crossed over, reinventing themselves as white South Africans. The essay approaches coloured identity through the lens of postcolonial diaspora theory, and more specifically, diasporic chaos theory.<\/p>\n

Read or purchase the article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Playing in the dark\/ playing in the light: Coloured identity in the novels of Zo\u00eb Wicomb Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa Volume 20, Issue 1, 2008 pages 1-15 DOI: 10.1080\/1013929X.2008.9678286 J. U. Jacobs, Senior Professor of English and Fellow University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa Zo\u00eb Wicomb’s three fictional works\u2014You Can’t Get Lost […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1295,12,125,1196,8,520,25],"tags":[8477,8476,20756,3447],"class_list":["post-18623","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-africa","category-articles","category-identitydevelopment","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","category-south-africa","category-women","tag-current-writing-text-and-reception-in-southern-africa","tag-j-u-jacobs","tag-south-africa","tag-zoe-wicomb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18623","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18623"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18623\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18623"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18623"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18623"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}