An Arc Beyond Stasis: Activism in the Hinterland-facing Fictions of Alex La Guma and Zoë Wicomb

This chapter puts into conversation novels by South African writers from the late-apartheid period—Alex La Guma’s In the Fog of the Seasons’ End (1972); Zoë Wicomb’s You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town (1987)—that chart journeys of protagonists from political naïveté to activism. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s theorization of stasis as civil war, and Walter Benjamin’s theses about the reanimation of past utopian hope in the present, it considers how both writers revalue stasis as potential in relation to a geography sketched as trajectory from city to hinterland (after Phil Neel). The arc, differently drawn in each work, answers the exigencies of each author’s moment, though tending always toward a reactivation of the potential that lies waiting in the hinterland, near or far.