Narratives of identity, belonging and dispossession represented through land ownership and expropriation in contemporary Southern African fiction

Abstract

This study investigates the embedded story of land found in contemporary Southern African fiction, with a particular focus on South Africa. It explores how land as material resource and symbolic site that functions not only as narrative backdrop but also as structuring principle, shapes character development in various contexts, event progression, and thematic resonance, forming the generated meaning emerging from a constructed outcome of narrative relations and contexts through the interaction between characters and their spatial environments. Drawing on a robust interdisciplinary framework that integrates genre theory, postcolonial theory, structural narratology, and narratological character theory, the research foregrounds what it terms story of land politics, abstracted from the investigated texts. This is achieved through nuanced analysis of three primary novels that includes Marguerite Poland’s A Sin of Omission (2019), Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu’s The Theory of Flight (2018), and Harry Kalmer’s A Thousand Tales of Johannesburg (2017). With this, the study was able to trace the evolution of land discourse across three historical phases, widely known as colonial imposition (territorialisation), resistance and reclamation (deterritorialisation), and post-independence reconfiguration (reterritorialisation). These texts were read as literary cartographies that reflect and critique the socio-political transformations of Southern Africa, of which South Africa constitutes the dominant representative. It is here that this study is at pains to reveal that land proves central to the construction of identity, belonging, and exclusion. Also, it demonstrates how colonial and postcolonial regimes deploy biopowers in the form of political instruments such as war, religion, language, and racial classification to regulate access to land. This manifests when characters are depicted as ideological agents, whose identities are shaped by their proximity to land ownership, as well as their ability to navigate exclusionary structures in the form of reigning governments in various contexts. Ultimately, this study argues that the investigated fiction provides critical space to reimagining justice and memory in the form of fictionalised and mirrored history, as well as postcolonial futures. By privileging narrative over history, the study also affirms the capacity of literature to explain the affective, ideological, and experiential dimensions of land politics in Southern Africa in such ways that historical records may not.