States of emergency and the apartheid legal order in South African fiction

Abstract

This essay considers how narratives of emergency in apartheid South Africa are figured in Richard Rive’s Emergency (1964) and Emergency Continued (1990). Beginning with a discussion of the role of emergency legislation in apartheid South Africa, the essay proceeds to consider how the rhetoric and force of the apartheid legal order is both foregrounded and contested in Rive’s fiction. The essay considers in particular the ways in which Rive’s fiction explores the constraints placed on writing during a state of emergency, and the limitations of protest writing as a literary paradigm. It concludes with a brief discussion of Zoë Wicomb’s David’s Story (2001), and asks how literary narratives can guard against the continuation of state violence in the context of the new South Africa.

Keywords:

• South Africa
• state of emergency
• apartheid
• biopolitics
• Richard Rive
• Zoë Wicomb

Notes

1. See Ivan Thomas Evans.

2. Deborah Posel argues that the “architects of Apartheid [ … ] grappled with ways of curtailing the growth of the urban African population, without thereby undermining the economic benefits of African labour” (8). One resolution to this tension was proposed by the “‘practical’ notion of Apartheid”, which held that “the problems generated by African proletarianisation could be solved by improved state control, rather than by fundamental restructuring of the country’s labour markets” (55).

3. See Darnton (133–76).

4. For more on Dutch colonial discourses of race and sexuality, see Stoler.

5. See Houen (70–71).

6. See Lee.

7. For more on the relationship between Kantian aesthetics and emergency law in Rive’s Emergency Continued, see Sitze (67–73).