Sea-changes, dark tides and littoral states: oceans and coastlines in post-apartheid South African narratives

Abstract

This article surveys representations of ocean and coastline in post-apartheid South African narratives, focusing on how they come to articulate a nation in and after transition. It finds that a restored sense of connection in the wake of the exceptional land a-part is one of the notable sea changes of the post-apartheid order as South Africa is re-imagined at the conjunction of Atlantic and Indian Oceans in the neoliberal global order, while various dark tides continue to transport and haunt the post-apartheid imagination. Some narratives plumb the ocean depths in search of metaphors of literariness, conceive of it as housing memory or evoke the littoral to imagine anti-dualist states. Others emphasise the sea as a "material space of nature‟ or suggest it summons ways of knowing that accommodate the mystery abjected and repressed by the enlightenment rationality that docked on South African shores during the long colonial encounter.