William Kentridge: Process as Metaphor & Other Doubtful Enterprises

The German philosopher Günter Grass once referred to literature as “a kind of stopgap, stepping in when necessary to give people without a voice the chance to speak” (Bourdieu and Grass 2002: 69). Historians, he argued, were limited in what they could say about the past; fiction could often present truer and more multidimensional representations of history than nonfiction, which was warped by the biases and silences of the documentary record. This seeming paradox been noted with great urgency in South Africa where, since the end of apartheid in 1994, fierce debates have taken place both within and outside the academy on the role of history and the limitations of the (post)colonial archive. Art—visual and dramatic as well as literary—would seem to provide the way out of a discursive morass where, as writers like Njabulo Ndebele and Jacob Dlamini have lamented, contemporary politics served as the single yardstick...