Time and Alterity in South African Writing: André Brink, J.M. Coetzee, and Zakes Mda Revisited

The Covid-19 pandemic has thrust us all into a warped, disjointed coronatime, which has both uncontrollably accelerated, and interminably decelerated, or got frozen. Just like the pandemic, this book provides a chance to reevaluate neoliberalisms temporal regimes of growth, decline, deceleration and acceleration. South Africa and its contemporary literature are a perfect background against which to think about temporality experimentally. Focusing on three South African authors, André Brink, J.M. Coetzee and Zakes Mda, the book examines contemporary South African revisioning of time and alterity. Through some of the previously unexplored texts, it studies what living in a post-conflict, post-revolutionary and highly traumatized society entails for ones perception of time and otherness.