South Africa offers fertile territory for the study of the relations between law and literature. The colonial heritage – race superiority, paternalism, economic exploitation, divide-and conquer str...

This chapter attempts in brief to rethink the history of magic by considering its relations with otherness. Otherness is conceived of as a relative and dynamic category, generated as the necessary result of claims to truth. The long history of the term 'magic' is characterised throughout by attempts to other it. The chapter pauses on several key moments in this history, ancient and medieval, before considering in slightly more detail the consequences of the Protestant Reformation for the imposition of a modern conception of magic. The rise of science and discourses of objectivity provide impetus for the modern othering of magic, and literature’s role in this process is examined through a focus on the rise of realism. The chapter then shows how the breakdown of consensus about the nature of reality in the early twentieth century leads to new forms of artistic expression, central among which is magical realism. It argues that throughout this long history magic, in a variety of forms, has displayed an extraordinary resilience, retaining its capacity to express important aspects of experience, society and meaning.

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The explosion of crime fiction in contemporary South Africa requires explanation in terms of its relations with actual crime in that country, with crime novels from elsewhere, and with trends in South African literary history. Taking issue with recent criticism which sees in the genre a turning away from historicity and the political, the article argues that the novels of Deon Meyer and Margie Orford display an engagement with major post-apartheid themes, and a politics that is, for the most part, liberal in nature. There is a striking correlation to be drawn between the proposals of South African criminologists and what contemporary crime novelists themselves explore in their fictions. Specifically, both return to the figure of the detective as an antidote to disorder, violence, and uncertainty. This essay interprets the meaning of the post-apartheid crime fiction phenomenon in terms of the novels' capacity to negotiate threat, and to profit from doing so.

The plaasroman (farm novel) of the 1920s and 1930s allowed Afrikaans writers to assert and explore a bond between the farmer and the soil, a bond that stands metonymically for the relations between culture, place and nation. This essay argues that Etienne Van Heerden’s 1986 novel, Toorberg, adapts and transforms the conventions of the plaasroman genre to give voice to a complicitous critique of the consequences of Afrikaner racial exclusivity in the 1980s. As a counterdiscursive plaasroman, Toorberg reveals and works through various layers of complicity finally to offer a prophetic glimpse of the possibility of reconciliation between possessors and the dispossessed. In documenting the clannish pride, aloofness, and arrogance of an aristocratic Afrikaans family, and by showing how these qualities result in the exclusion and impoverishment of its mixed-race relatives, Van Heerden’s novel maps the psychosocial underpinnings of apartheid.

Critics’ comments on the dustcovers of Niq Mhlongo’s novels, Dog Eat Dog (2004) and After Tears (2007), praise them for their ability to capture “the raw colour of the township” and Mhlongo is described as “the authentic voice [ … ] of being young, black and living in the township in a new democracy”. His contribution to an ongoing art project called remotewords run by the German artists Achim Mohné and Uta Kopp, seeks to represent Soweto on its terms. This essay explores the tensions and contradictions within this project of giving voice to a neglected part of the city. Mhlongo’s narrators are reluctant tricksters, con-artists, who lie, steal and cheat through narratives which describe the gritty, aspirant milieu of post-apartheid Johannesburg. This essay argues that these novels are no simple celebration of a new post-apartheid township chic. Instead they enact a critique of a post-apartheid reality in which social relations are deformed by ongoing exploitation and in which the post-apartheid project – so full of the promises of justice, fairness and equality – shows the signs of a grotesque betrayal.

Notwithstanding its popularity and the presence of clear literary critical definitions, the term magical realism continues to attract controversy and confusion. This essay explores the reasons for this state of affairs, and proposes solutions for it. It rejects the vagueness that accompanies much criticism of magical realism, and advocates an approach that attends to narrative technologies of form and structure, while also insisting that cultural and historical particularities be respected.

Starting from a basic understanding of magical realism as a mode of narration that seeks to naturalize the supernatural, this essay draws a distinction between faith and irreverence in magical realist discourse. It offers a brief account of magical realism's conceptual and literary history, analyses the state of current critical discourse and suggests ways in which nuanced modes of reading magical realist literature can be developed. Drawing from the early theorizing of Alejo Carpentier, the article proposes that one strand of magical realism is characterized by the desire to affirm non-western world views and cultural modalities. On the other hand, Carpentier's contemporary, Jorge Luis Borges, provides the paradigm for an alternative view of magical realism that sees it as similar in key respects to postmodern literary projects. These contrasting approaches are then tested with reference to the magical realism of Ben Okri and Salman Rushdie.

Games studies today are characterised by both the novelty of interpreting the unfolding digital revolution, and insecurity about where the discipline stands in terms of other academic fields of inquiry. The ludology/narratology debate exhibits two important features: anxiety about the proximity of the discipline to the games industry, and a formalist bias that dominates the field. Focussing on race and alignment in role playing games, this paper addresses this bias by asserting the relevance of cultural materialist and postcolonial modes of critique to commercially-produced computer games. It is argued that games like Baldur’s Gate I and II cannot be properly understood without reference to the fantasy novels that inform them. When historicised, the genre of fantasy reveals an implicit reliance on notions of race and moral alignment. The ways these notions re-appear in digital role playing games is shown to be relevant to current political and social realities of the West.

VLADISLAVIC: Not really. I'm interested in writing from that part of the world, but I wouldn't call it a genetic predisposition. I'm interested in some Yugoslav writing, for instance, because of the issues those writers deal with—questions of nationalism, their relationship with the Soviet Union, social change and historical memory, and so on. But I suppose such themes would interest me anyway regardless of my background. I also like Czech writers like Kundera, and Polish writers like Bruno Schulz. ́