Cultural Entanglement, Displacement and Contemporary Durban in Imraan Coovadia’s High Low In-between

Abstract

This article focuses on Imraan Coovadia’s High Low In-between and investigates how the novel’s join protagonists, Nafisa and Shakeer, navigate their contemporary Durban. The mother and son, I point out, present two disparate subjectivities that engage with both the urban milieu of the city and a globalised world in very different ways. Both experience a sense of displacement in the city, but, as thew novel progresses, they manage to embrace Durban’s contemporary cultural entanglements and feel more at home. Nafisa, a doctor in the inner city, learns to engage with the city through walking its streets while Shakeer, a globe-trotting photographer, discovers his ability to notice Durban’s local specificity and entanglement of places, people, and cultures.

Keywords:

• Imraan Coovadia
• High Low In-between
• entanglement
• displacement
• South African literature
• post-apartheid literature

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See Muller (2017) for a fuller discussion on Ismet’s engagement with fin de siècle Durban in The Wedding.

2 Coovadia is no stranger to marrying globalisation and crime in his fictions. His sophomore offering, Green-eyed Thieves (2006), sees twin brothers Firoze and Ashraf travel around the globe, pulling off daring capers. For a full discussion of cosmopolitan criminality in Green-eye Thieves, see Muller (2016).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alan Muller

Alan Muller is a lecturer in the Unit of Academic Literacy at the University of Pretoria. He is a co-editor of Cities in Flux: Metropolitan Spaces in South African Literary and Visual Texts. His most recent article is ‘Futures Forestalled … for Now: South African Science Fiction and Futurism.’