Wicomb, Zoë (1948—)

Novelist, short-story writer and essayist Zoë Wicomb was born in Namaqualand, South Africa. Much of her fiction and criticism deals with the construction of racial identity in South Africa. Under the Apartheid system, Wicomb and her family were considered ‘coloured’, the label applied to, among others, persons of mixed racial background.

Towards a Critical Nostalgia

South African-born, Scottish-resident author Zoë Wicomb is a key postapartheid literary figure; her oeuvre complicates assumptions about locatedness, ethnicity, and cosmopolitanism. This chapter reads her novels—David’s Story (2000), Playing in the Light (2006), October (2014)—and select short fiction—in You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town (1987) and The One That Got Away (2008); ‘In Search of Tommie’ (2010)—to consider how Wicomb stages text itself as a privileged space within which to hold open the promise of the ‘loose end’ (a recurring metaphor), exploring its potential to unravel older formations in the social fabric to suggest new narrative and relational threads. It argues that the prevalence of queer subjects in her fiction mirrors Wicomb’s formally ‘queer’ strategies, including meta- and intertextuality, which offer more than the textual equivalent of characters’ displacements or the author’s own restless transnationalism (here October’s debts to Marilynne Robinson’s novel Home are canvassed).