Rethinking the Romance Genre

Global Intimacies in Contemporary Literary and Visual Culture

E. Davis

• Editore: Palgrave Macmillan
• Anno: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137371874
• Argomento: Media & Performing Arts
• Categoria: Film History & Criticism

Rethinking the Romance Genre examines why the romance genre has proven such an irresistible form for contemporary writers and filmmakers as they approach global issues. In contemporary texts ranging from literary works, to films, to social media, romance facilitates a range of intimacies that offer new feminist models in the age of globalization.

CHAPTER 1

1980S SOUTH AFRICAN FICTION AND THE ROMANCE OF RESISTANCE

The liberation struggle of our people was not about liberating blacks from bondage; but more so it was about liberating white people from fear.

Tokyo Sexwale, an ANC activist jailed with Nelson Mandela on Robben Island, makes this astute comment during an interview in a 1999 documentary about Nelson Mandela.¹ Sexwale’s claim presents a pithy formulation for a set of tensions I trace in this chapter regarding South African writing in the 1980s. I find troubling the ways in which Sexwale’s statement downplays black oppression and makes black liberation contingent upon white transformation. At the same time, his words underscore the necessity for any vision of social revolution to consider the transformation of both white and black consciousness. South African writers were naturally compelled to take up this charge in the 1980s, a decade characterized by violent resistance inspired by Steve Biko’s Black Consciousness Movement and by intensified suppression of public dissent.

During this apocalyptic period, when it became increasingly clear that the present order could not continue, prominent South African writers such as J. M. Coetzee, André Brink, Lewis Nkosi, and Nadine Gordimer were forced to question the goal, or indeed the potential, of both black and white writing under what Brink called “a state of siege” in apartheid South Africa.² To whom could one address one’s work when 80 percent of the population was effectively barred from the nation’s public life and when the majority of one’s readers belonged to an international audience outside of one’s own country, where one’s writing was intermittently or even constantly banned? As a writer contemplating revolution, where should one locate the ugly heart of the apartheid system—in the psychosis of empire, in racist law, in the commodifying logic of capitalism? And what would the revolution mean when it came? Coetzee, Brink, Nkosi, and Gordimer find different answers to these questions, to be sure, but what I draw attention to in this chapter is the striking fact that the works of writers in this period of flux rely so heavily on sexuality, on the possibilities of desire and love in South Africa, for their representational and political projects.³

As earlier novels such as William Plomer’s Turbott Wolfe (1926), Peter Abrahams’s The Path of Thunder (1948), and Gordimer’s An Occasion for Loving (1963) demonstrate, the trope of interracial romance did not simply emerge in the 1980s but had been a staple of antiracist fiction stretching back even before the apartheid era. However, the texts I discuss in this chapter were entering a much more politicized and engaged international publishing market than their predecessors. In the United States and Britain, South Africa was on the news, sanctions were being hotly debated in Congress and Parliament, and racial unrest at home shaped the response to South African writers. At such a politicized moment both at home and abroad, in which mass protest and targeted public violence had become key organizing strategies, how do we interpret the decision to maintain a focus on the very element so often defined against politics—the realm of interpersonal desire? The novel as a Western genre demands a certain grounding in the private dynamics of love and family, the business of the interpersonal, so one could argue that even the most outspokenly political of South African novelists is obliged on some level to include these novelistic staples in their work. Moreover, all of the authors have at one point or another made clear that they feel strongly obligated not to allow their art to “deteriorate” into propaganda, even as they position themselves against the apartheid regime.⁴

I believe that sexuality plays such a dominant role in the work of these novelists because it bridges the gap between the public and the private; thus it allows them to point outward toward the social system of apartheid even as they demonstrate the extent to which apartheid as a social system depends on rigidly defining and policing the intimate space of the body and its desires. For these writers, freedom does not simply depend upon the crucial work of legal/political emancipation, as it also requires a psychological liberation from internalized structures of domination, a process Ngugi wa’Thiongo famously labeled “decolonising the mind.”⁵ To return to Sexwale’s statement, then, the liberation struggle was necessarily about both—the psychological liberation of whites and blacks from the psychosis of empire and the political/legal/economic liberation of the oppressed black population. By employing the interracial sexual dyad in order to theorize liberation, these writers open up a space for imagining a transformation of sexual and family relations as part of revolution, a space that has frequently gone missing in the ideology and praxis of nationalist resistance.⁶ Needless to say, this mapping of sex onto revolutionary politics frequently fails to exceed the limits of current constructions of sexual politics. But even so, the move toward considering sexuality as an essential component of revolutionary politics is a crucial step in theorizing radical social change.

APARTHEID LEGISLATION, INTIMACY, AND WHITE FEAR

The yoking of revolutions in the public and private spheres enabled by the trope of the interracial couple is particularly apt in a historical context in which the apparatus of imperialism itself invested a great deal of energy in policing the parameters of interracial contact of all kinds. In the United States, where the specter of the black male rapist served to justify the abuse and enslavement of the black population for the economic gain of whites in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through the Jim Crow era, anti-miscegenation legislation remained on the legal books as a cornerstone of white supremacy well into the twentieth century. Similarly, in South Africa, legislating racial segregation was a top priority for the National Party when it came to power in 1948. This marked a change from earlier periods, when colonial interests from Germany, the Netherlands, Britain, and elsewhere jostled for dominance and racial policies varied considerably. Laws tended to differ from area to area even after the British defeated the Dutch colonists in the Boer War and claimed control over the formerly Dutch colonies as well as the protectorates of Bechuanaland (now Botswana), Swaziland, and Basutoland (now Lesotho) in the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902.⁷

After years of conflict between the British and the Afrikaners for control of South Africa, the Afrikaner-run National Party won a parliamentary majority in 1948 on the slogan of “apartheid,” or “separateness.”⁸ The new National Party government wasted no time in implementing its plan, as evidenced by the first acts it passed. The Mixed Marriages Act of 1949 prohibited marriages between whites and blacks. It was soon extended to forbid marriages between whites and other groups, such as Indians and so-called colored South Africans with the passing of the Immorality Act of 1950, which prohibited any sexual intercourse across racial lines. Finally, the Population Registration Act of 1950 required every South African to be assigned to a specific racial group. The combined impact of these acts was devastating. Families whose members claimed to belong—or were classified by the government as belonging—to different racial groups were forcibly separated, sparking a deluge of court petitions for “reclassification” by family members trying to legally live as one family.⁹

These were certainly not the only significant pieces of legislation passed by the National Party in the early years, as the Group Areas Act (1950), the Abolition of Passes and Documents Act (1952), and the Bantu Education Act (1953) had an equally devastating effect on the black population.¹⁰ What interests me about the timing of this anti-miscegenation legislation is what it says about the white fears that enabled a government to win the majority white vote on a platform of racial segregation. By initiating its legislative program with acts specifically forbidding intimate contact between blacks and whites, the National Party aimed to exploit the dominating white fears that Sexwale addresses—fears of contact, of consensual desire, and of bodily proximity.¹¹ As the noted anti-apartheid activist and lawyer Albie Sachs explained in the early 1970s, “The court cases which undoubtedly arouse the greatest public excitement in South Africa are those brought under the Immorality Act (referred to by newspaper headline-writers as the ‘Sex Act’), which prohibits any form of sexual relations between white and non-white.”¹² This public excitement underscores the extent to which interracial sex in apartheid South Africa became an overdetermined signifier for the most dangerous and alluring forms of intimacy between races. Responding directly to this fear and excitement in the 1980s, South African writers explore the possibility that the political and psychological crises provoked by interracial desire could lead to revolution.

The following sections proceed chronologically through four key texts from the 1980s by prominent South African authors. As I explain above, I concentrate on the 1980s because it is a time of epistemological and political crisis in South Africa, and several of the texts that have attained pride of place in the South African literary canon emerge in this period. I open with a reading of J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), an allegorical meditation upon the roles of dominator and dominated played out between a white colonial magistrate and an unnamed “barbarian” woman. Here I focus on the mutual imbrication of masculinity and empire, and the threat posed to both of them by the unraveling of colonial power. Next, I turn to André Brink’s A Chain of Voices (1982), a historical novel about nineteenth-century Boer farming culture that describes in painful detail the impact of a slave-driven agricultural economy upon settlers and slaves alike. While Brink seeks to present the brutality of slavery for black women, his approach to the novel unfortunately ends up replicating the masculinism of much anti-apartheid radicalism. Lewis Nkosi’s Mating Birds (1986) confronts the problem of masculinity as well, dramatizing white paranoia about the black male rapist through the story of a young Zulu man’s ambiguous encounter with a white woman and his resulting prosecution for rape. Nkosi emphasizes the ways in which the social structure of apartheid effectively thwarts the psychic needs for love and intellectual fulfillment. The novel locates this traumatic psychological damage not in the peculiarities of the nuclear family, as in Western psychoanalysis, but in the social inequalities of the apartheid system. A certain ambivalence emerges in the novel, however, around the cause of love’s failure in that, even as Nkosi underlines the social roots of interracial sexual violence in the injustices of the apartheid state, he ascribes to both white and black women in the novel a natural propensity for sexual betrayal. Finally, I turn to Nadine Gordimer’s A Sport of Nature (1987), a provocative utopian vision of a new set of psychological and social dynamics the novel views as necessary for sustaining an independent South Africa. While the novel presents a compelling picture of white and black cooperative action, it must reinforce traditional sexist gender roles to achieve its valorization of sexual desire as revolutionary consciousness. The inability of these texts to fully imagine sexual revolution, I conclude, stems not only from the parameters of the interracial trope in the South African context, but from a broader inability of the genre of the national romance to escape the limitations of revolutionary nationalist rhetoric with regard to questions of gender and sexuality.

J. M. COETZEE AND THE CRISIS OF IMPERIAL MASCULINITY

Coetzee’s meditation on the workings of empire in Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) revolves primarily around a fraught relationship between a colonial magistrate and a so-called barbarian girl whom the magistrate takes in. This unnamed woman has been permanently disabled by her torture at the hands of Colonel Joll, an official sent with his army from the colonial center to prepare the rural outpost for an impending barbarian invasion. As the novel progresses, it becomes clear to the magistrate that it is the empire itself that is truly barbaric. Many scholars have devoted critical attention to the allegorical nature of the novel¹³ and its deconstruction of the Western liberal philosophical tradition, as well as its critique of empire’s totalizing conceptions of history.¹⁴ Benita Parry and Derek Attridge analyze the function of the silent other in Coetzee’s work, an issue to which I will return later in my discussion of the barbarian girl.¹⁵

However, surprisingly little critical attention has been paid to the function of gender and sexuality in Coetzee’s work in general, and in Waiting for the Barbarians in particular.¹⁶ In one article specifically on the figure of the barbarian girl in the novel, Jennifer Wenzel, following Attridge, traces the way in which the girl’s tortured body becomes its own language that resists interpretation by the magistrate and, by extension, the reader. This allows Wenzel to respond to the overwhelming tendency in Coetzee scholarship to claim his work either as political intervention or as escapist art. By claiming a language of the body as a form of politics in Coetzee’s text, Wenzel hopes to demonstrate that “a deconstructive criticism can also be a criticism of the state.”¹⁷ I am not convinced that the silently speaking body of the other automatically produces a politics of resistance to the state, and in the following analysis I lay out the ways in which a reading that interrogates the nexus of masculinity, sexuality, and violence can complicate our understanding of the politics of otherness in Coetzee’s text.

Sexuality and power are public and private bedfellows under colonialism. As Coetzee’s magistrate points out, “There is no woman living along the frontier who has not dreamed of a dark barbarian hand coming from under the bed to grip her ankle, no man who has not frightened himself with visions of barbarians carousing in his home, breaking the plates, setting fire to the curtains, raping his daughters.”¹⁸ The white fears of revolution voiced by Sexwale are translated both by a paranoid apartheid state and by the unnamed empire of Coetzee’s novel into a crisis of white sexuality in the face of violent black male sexuality. White masculinity must constantly be reinforced against this sexualized narrative of potential black male power through sexualized tortures such as the genital mutilation of black men and the rape of black women.

Because sexuality is such a key nexus for imperial fears and regulations, Anne McClintock has argued that postcolonial scholarship must learn to theorize the mutual articulation of political, economic, psychological, and sexual dominance in the project of empire.¹⁹ With McClintock’s challenge in mind, I argue that the magistrate’s crisis of masculinity in the novel represents an attempt to theorize the problem of gender and sexuality for anticolonial resistance. However, although Coetzee’s magistrate manages to deconstruct the ideological assumptions of imperial history and the liberal philosophical apparatus that categorizes civilized versus barbarian, the barbarian girl is a limit that forces him to fall back upon stereotypical tropes of masculinity and heterosexuality as the basis for his sense of self. A fascinating story thus unfolds in which the magistrate repositions himself in relation to a series of men and women in the novel, only to be forced to shift again when he cannot fix his identity against one figure after another. Critics like Wenzel have tended to read the magistrate’s unraveling identity as evidence of Coetzee’s yoking of poststructuralist theory to an anti-apartheid political project. But this political project can only take us so far: the magistrate’s deconstruction also depends on appropriating the pain of others and, significantly, permits him to regain power at the end of the novel as a kinder, gentler face of empire.

From the beginning, Coetzee’s magistrate resists the version of masculinity performed by Colonel Joll, the colonial administrator and torturer whose arrival in the magistrate’s settlement initiates a cycle of violence that drives the rest of the book. Joll represents for the magistrate a sort of decadent cosmopolitanism, an imperial masculinity that undermines conventional masculinity through its threatening combination of feminized consumption and sophisticated technologies of violence. The magistrate scorns Joll, “whom with his tapering finger-nails, his mauve handkerchiefs, his slender feet in soft shoes I keep imagining back in the capital he is so obviously impatient for, murmuring to his friends in theatre corridors between the acts” (5). With his ridiculous sunglasses and cosmopolitan diversions, Joll infuriates the magistrate.²⁰ “He walks with his hands clasped before him like a woman,” the magistrate declares dismissively (4). The magistrate associates Joll’s softness, or implied womanliness, not only with the bourgeois, bureaucratized violence of state torture, but also with the specter of homosexuality.

It is only as the magistrate begins to come to terms with the fact that he, like Joll, is implicated in the service of empire through his relationship with the barbarian girl that his sexuality becomes the locus of a personal crisis. Struggling to explain to himself his obsession with the barbarian girl, the magistrate realizes to his horror that he, like Joll, enacts the empire’s drive to leave its mark upon the colonized. He has never questioned his association of masculine sexuality with “entering” or “penetrating,” but this association suddenly bec...