Representing Discontent: South Africa in words and on screen

This project focuses on the affective shaping of identity in South African texts of the 21st century. In particular, I wish to examine how South African creatives (a category that truces South Africa as a zone of activity rather than a geographical starting point) have written about the South African post-transition. I propose to read a variety of South African creative texts (novels, short story collections, films) as scenes of relation from which we might conceptualize how affect is shaping depictions of South African cultural subjectivities. The project thinks about discontent as a structure of feeling that attends to the negotiation of attachments and alienations represented in these works: what fantasies of ordinariness are displaced, reformulated or disordered by life in the durative present?