ABSTRACT
This chapter pitches the fraught cosmopolitanism of You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town against the trenchant localism of October, which deepens the dislocations of the earlier book, heightens the characters' sense of disbelonging, and performs at the level of narrative a delicate balancing act between two locales. The centrality of the cognitive violence of the apartheid state, so effectively critiqued in You Can't Get Lost, yields to the new reality of the neoliberal, globalised state, which demands new forms of representation and opposition. The chapter shows how Zoe Wicomb negotiates the cosmopolitan and the translocal with reference to geography and cartography. They are, in a sense, figures for a pervasive telescopic vision that marks Wicomb's work, from You Can't Get Lost on. The short fiction cycle balances delicately between totality and dissolution, each individual story both an instance of the whole and an independent, sovereign narrative.
