YOSHIDA Yutaka (Hitotsubashi University)
“Metonymy of Bodies, Memories of Skin: The Post-apartheid, or the Unfinished Decolonization, in Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light”

This paper aims to locate a mediating role of affects and bodies in the work of a South African writer, Zoë Wicomb, who has been reputed as the one who first captured the reality of post-Apartheid South Africa. Her complex representation of narrative, gender, and political contexts presages the difficulty of overcoming the residue of racial antagonism that is tenaciously inherited from the long period of white minority rule. Especially among many writings published as critical reactions to the Truth Reconciliation Commission, her second novel, Playing in the Light (2006), poses important questions: Should memories of violence be secluded into the relation between victims and perpetrators who appear on public hearings? If not, how, and to what extent, can bystanders (observers) or their children take responsibility for not having directly intervened in the atrocity of apartheid?

Wicomb’s use of shame and the uncanny answers these questions. Although shame, compared to guilt, has been defined as a narcissistic emotion, I argue that shame enhances the recognition of denial and of complicity with apartheid in colourded people who were bystanders. Moreover, I point out that this sense of complicity is made visible by the transformed use of the uncanny: whereas the accepted discourse on the uncanny has been predicated by a strongly male-centered discourse, the uncanny in Playing in the Light, brings about the damaged bodies of women, by way of shame. As such, Wicomb recognizes one’s implications in an enduring historicity, such as colonialism; this recognition perhaps might go beyond the category of remembering and forgetting.



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