Zoë Wicomb's Playing in the Light: Terror in the Domestic Space - Aika Swai (UCT)

Aika Swai from the University of Cape Town begins her mini-lecture by offering an introduction to the writer, Zoë Wicomb, who was born in 1948, the same year that the National Party came to power and began the process of implementing the system of racial segregation known as apartheid. The racial legislations imposed by the racist apartheid government impacted all levels of society, ensuring that all individuals were registered by race, were forced to live in areas designated by that race, and prevented from having interracial relationships. Dr Swai argues that Wicomb’s novel, Playing in the Light (2006), shows both the multi-layered consequences of this racialised population control and suggests ways of undoing and dismantling assumptions and norms about race and gender. Through close analysis of the protagonist, Marion, who confronts the painful legacy of her family's decision to "play white" during apartheid, Dr Swai interrogates broader societal issues around constructions of race, memory, identity, guilt, and reconciliation in South African literature, history and culture.

Further Reading

Kai Easton and Derek Attridge, eds., Zoë Wicomb & the Translocal: Writing Scotland & South Africa (Routledge, 2017)

David Hoegberg, ‘Building new selves: identity, “Passing,” and intertextuality in Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light’, Safundi 19.4 (2018), 482-501

Maria Olaussen, ‘Generation and Complicity in Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light’, Social Dynamics, 35.1 (2009), 149-161

Andrew van der Vlies, ‘The Archive, the Spectral, and Narrative Responsibility in Zoë Wicomb's Playing in the Light’, Journal of Southern African Studies 36.3 (2010), 583-598

Zoë Wicomb, Playing in the Light (The New Press, 2006)

---, Race, Nation, Translation: South African Essays 1990-2013, ed. by Andrew van der Vlies (Yale University Press, 2018)