“Wishy-washy liberalism” and “the art of getting lost” in Ivan Vladislavić’s Double Negative:

Dass, Minesh

Title: “Wishy-washy liberalism” and “the art of getting lost” in Ivan Vladislavić’s Double Negative:
Creator: Dass, Minesh
Date Issued: 2017
Date: 2017
Type: text
Type: article
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/142633
Identifier: vital:38097
Identifier: DOI: 10.4314/eia.v44i3.1
Description: The politics of the protagonist of Ivan Vladislavić’s Double Negative, Neville Lister, are broadly liberal during apartheid, but show signs of becoming more conservative during the post-apartheid era. In this article, I argue that this development is unsurprising because bourgeois white liberals and conservatives in South Africa continue to cling to the privileges afforded them as the propertied class. For this reason, acknowledgements of privilege and quests for discomfort, while not necessarily dishonest, do not in and of themselves constitute progressive politics. Rather, one can, as Neville does, become comfortable with discomfort so long as it allows one to enjoy a privileged lifestyle. I therefore draw a distinction between the unease argued for in much of what constitutes whiteness studies, and a sense of being lost that seems to demand the loss of the home and its attendant association with control. This sense of lostness emerges in two ways in the novel: in a description of a photograph that contains the spectral presence of a dead child, and in a game that Neville played when he was a young boy. Both of these sections of the text also deal with the limits of art – of writing and of photography in particular. I propose that these self-reflexive episodes suggest the novel’s own limits, and gesture beyond them in ways that are worth consideration by its middle-class readership.
Format: 22 pages
Format: pdf
Language: English
Relation: English in Africa
Relation: Dass, M., 2017. “Wishy-washy liberalism” and “the art of getting lost” in Ivan Vladislavić’s Double Negative. English in Africa, 44(3), pp.9-30.
Relation: English in Africa volume 44 number 3 9 30 November 2017 0376-8902
Rights: Publisher
Rights: Use of this resource is governed by the terms and conditions of the English In Africa Copyright Statement (https://www.ajol.info/index.php/eia/about/submissions#copyrightNotice)

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Dass, Minesh (Dr)

RU Department of Literary Studies in English

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