Reading Zoë Wicomb's cosmopolitan, domestic and recursive settings

Abstract

To read Zoë Wicomb is to engage simultaneously with a ‘citizen of the world’ and a ‘provincial writer’. Moving between cosmopolitan and domestic settings, or setting in motion recursive structures that enfold the cosmos in the domestic and the domestic in the cosmos, Wicomb takes up the retelling of Cape hi/stories and cosmopolitan visions, presenting us with “another story” of what it might mean to be simultaneously local and worldly. Saturated with textual recursion and uncanny figures, her fictional settings advance and invite renewed analysis of domestic and/or cosmopolitan conditions.