ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests encountering gradations—or, perhaps more appropriately, shades—of dissent. It explores the idea in respect of haunting figures emergent across the twentieth century in South African literatures. The tale of South African politics is, Antjie Krog suggests, something akin to a haunted house: narratives of liberal empire—elaborately extended as apartheid from the middle of the twentieth century—are populated by restless, revenant things. To read Perceval Gibbon’s ghost stories as haunted by that which their imperial premises cannot acknowledge is to engage in a particular historical praxis. The ability of the ghost to interrupt ‘modern’ knowledges becomes especially important if it is considered that, in South Africa, the epistemologies have unfolded with the processes of imperial expansion. Discourses inherited from Enlightenment modernity inform British imperial governance, and they live on as the founding premise of apartheid rule, which began with the election of the National Party in 1948.
