- Title
- Bastards and bodies in Zoë Wicomb’s David’s Story:
- Creator
- Marais, Mike
- Date Issued
- 2005
- Date
- 2005
- Type
- text
- Type
- article
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/10962/144264
- Identifier
- vital:38326
- Identifier
- https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0021989405056969
- Description
- The Population Registration Act of 1950, in the apartheid period of South African history, defined a coloured person as “a person who is not a White person or a Black”. In differentiating coloured from white, coloured from black, and black from white, somatic appearance obviously played a crucial role. So, for instance, a white person was defined as “a person who (a) in appearance obviously is a White person, and who is not generally accepted as a Coloured person; or (b) is generally accepted as a White person and is not in appearance obviously not a White person”.1 It follows that the body of the individual was read as a signifier of racial identity, a hermeneutic practice still prevalent in present-day South Africa. My argument in this essay is that Zoë Wicomb’s David’s Story2 shows how the trope of “pure blood” in the discourse of race not only reduces the body of the individual coloured person to a material sign of racial difference, but also inscribes a history of shame on that body.
- Format
- 16 pages
- Format
- Language
- English
- Relation
- The Journal of Commonwealth Literature
- Relation
- Marais, M., 2005. Bastards and bodies in Zoë Wicomb’s David’s story. The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 40(3), pp.21-36.
- Relation
- The Journal of Commonwealth Literature volume 40 number 3 21 36 2005 1741-6442
- Rights
- Publisher
- Rights
- Use of this resource is governed by the terms and conditions of the Sage Journals Terms of Use statement (https://journals.sagepub.com/page/policies/terms-of-use)
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Marais, Mike (Prof)
RU Department of Literary Studies in English
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