ABSTRACT
This essay is about three global phenomena: Christianity, literature, and capitalism. Its principal site is South Africa at the turn of the millennium, where the continuing effects of institutionalized racism collide with the inequities of global finance. While the legal-political system of apartheid is officially over, its conditions and many of its inequities remain. “Reconciliation,” as I explore it here, thus names a problem, a question: how does one deal with the past when the past continues to structure and shape the present? I pursue this question through two novels: The Heart of Redness (2000) by Zakes Mda, and J. M. Coetzee’s better-known novel Disgrace (1999). Both are set in the welter of post-apartheid South Africa, amid the scars of the past and the uncertainty of the present. Though the ethical and formal visions of these novels are strikingly different, both begin with the premise that despite the repeal of the apartheid laws racism and capitalism continue to work hand in hand. Is reconciliation, particularly as instituted by South Africa’s famous Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), adequate to this reality? Here the third phenomenon, global Christianity, enters the analysis. I am particularly interested in how the discourses of reconciliation and healing track a global Christianity as it confronts indigenous cultural forms in a post-colonial world itself overshadowed by the specter of global capital. Of necessity, reconciliation has particular historical relationships with both Christianity and capitalism. In both novels, likewise, it appears as a colonial project and as a front for global capital. But it also appears as the ambiguous location of an alternative future. By exploring both novels’ visions of reconciliation in the context of world literature and of Christianity’s transnational and translational roots, this essay outlines the political possibilities embedded in literary form.
