The book develops from something of a paradox: despite momentous political transition from apartheid to democracy, little in South Africa’s socio-economic reality actually changed. It discusses how the contemporary South African novel engages with this reality. In forms of literary experiment, the novels open up intellectual spaces shaping or contesting the idea of the “new South Africa”. The mediatisation of truth at the TRC hearings, how to deal with a spectacular yet covert past, the shaping of inclusive itinerant counterpublics, HIV/AIDS as the preeminent site to test capitalist modernity, white anxieties about dispossession, human disease as environmental injustice and the ways art and visual culture enable restorative cultural memory: through key nodes of intellectual thought, the novels speak to recent debates on world-literature by registering the shock of the unevenness of a modernity produced by a capitalist world economy. weiterlesen