Representations of the National and Trans-national in Phaswane Mpe's Welcome to Our Hillbrow
Lesibana Rafapa, Kgomotso Masemola
As creative agents of knowledge production in the domain of humanities
knowledge, South African writers such as Phaswane Mpe have the historical
burden of participating in the transformation of knowledge in ways that
revolutionize the role of artistic performance with a view to prompting social
transformation. In our context, Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to our Hillbrow
(2001) actively generates emergent grammars that underpin a transformational
thrust through a distinctive transnational bent, where xenophobia and
rural myopia are countered through a deliberative narrative of doubt cast on a
putative insular South African-ness pitted against master narratives of
national unity, on the one hand, and disruptive vectors such as HIV/AIDS and
witchcraft, on the other. As a significant discourse that constitutes humanities
knowledge, a novel such as Mpe’s contributesto a project’s transformation of
knowledge in its departure from, and disavowal of, a totalizing master
narrative of nationalism, putting in place a macabre post-national struggle of
dystopia. It specifically tests the limits knowledge production and
consumption around the topical issues of HIV/AIDS and immigration. It
proceeds to show how Phaswane Mpe’s novel has successfully debunked
myths of a privileged autochthonous habitus. The novel eschews characterising
unstable homologies of the rural and urban divide and, in like manner,
the South African and ‘foreigner’ bar, as a starting point for meaningful
knowledge transformation about immigration and the HIV/ AIDS stigma
through transnationalism and transculturation of language by way of an idiom
of intertextuality represented by a transnational bent. We demonstrate
throughout that transnationalism prompts a signifcation of cultural transformation
in the novel under discussion, viz. Welcome to our Hillbrow.
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