Judging New ‘South African’ Fiction in the Transnational Moment

Abstract

This essay raises the question of whether, in a public sphere which is more transnational than national, the pursuit of ‘South African’ literary historiography in the ‘national’ mould has not become a somewhat pointless task. In view of what appears to be an emigration from the field of ‘South African literature’ among literary scholars, the task of sifting and evaluating every year’s crop of new writing, I argue, has largely fallen to the judges and conveners of literary prizes. The essay looks at this ‘pragmatic’ literary
historiography and the standards informing it, and asks the question whether ‘distant reading’ has not now become an inevitability, given the sheer profusion of new work issuing from South African publishers on an annual basis.