Trespassing: reading three white women’s representations of identity in narratives with South African settings.

Abstract

The stimulus for this study is a photo exhibition Seeing White (2003) in which Michelle Booth invites white subjects to view themselves as the objectified ‘other’. Her exhibition is related to the growing field of whiteness studies which informs my reading of representations of identity in autobiographical novels by three white women writers: Small Moving Parts (2010) by Sally-Ann Murray, False River (2013) by Dominique Botha and In the Garden of the Fugitives (2018) by Ceridwen Dovey. All three novels contain South African settings. While I position Murray, Botha and Dovey as writers in a contemporary post-apartheid context, I also consider their positionality within a broader postcolonial frame, particularly Dovey, whose novel I analyse as a transnational text which is relevant to both South African and global audiences. Their precariousness within these contexts is implied in the word “Trespassing” which prefaces the title of this dissertation. My interpretation of the three postcolonial texts by Murray, Botha and Dovey engages with discourses of whiteness, feminism, autobiography and the critical approach of symptomatic and reparative analysis. All three writers present versions of pasts which are marked by racial division. In this study, Sarah Nuttall’s theory of entanglement thus provides a useful counter discourse to the metanarrative of apartheid. Murray and Botha respond to registers of reconciliation following the TRC’s call for healing, and their narratives reframe their apartheid childhood as ordinary lives. Dovey’s allegorical representation of complicity exposes issues of power and oppression which underly colonial and gender ideology. The inclusion of Dovey’s transnational novel highlights that South Africa’s literary and social landscape in not only defined by local responses, but also by British and North American publishers and readers. By engaging with notions of ‘trespassing’ in both reparative and symptomatic readings of the novels, I argue that the representation of fractured selfhood in the three autobiographical novels resists the privileging of race as the central determinant of identity.