The Translocality of Southern African Literary Cities

Abstract

My paper looks at the translocality of African cities in literature/creative fiction. I study how the concept of translocality plays out in ways that challenge us to rethink how we view Southern Africa and its literary cities. This is particularly evident in the context of migration between Zimbabwe and South Africa. These two countries share histories which are steeped in culture and close people to people connections. My rationale pivots on the ideas of Lena Mattheis (1) who advances that “Contemporary city novels are increasingly characterised by a global, transcultural and complex quality that becomes particularly tangible in their spatial settings and narrative voices. Novels such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (2014), Teju Cole’s Open City (2011) or Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss (2006) are translocal insofar as that they are set in two or more distant cities, which—by means of a variety of narrative techniques—are closely layered, connected and intertwined. This reflects not only a more and more translocal world but also calls for innovative approaches in narratology in order to capture translocality, ‘cityness’ and the literary representations of both”. What this means is that we should be able to draw connections and parallels between different places and spaces. It is important to realise that temporality has a special role in defining spatiality. I propose that spatiotemporality is accentuated and propagated by concepts such as translocality. In addition , I advance the position that one of the key concepts of translocality is simultaneity. Simultaneity is the idea that events don’t just happen locally. As a result of the globalized world we operate in, local events have multinational effects. I survey a range of fictions to foreground the position of translocality as a relevant and impactful literary epistemology.