ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses a consideration of African Farm as a modernist novel, focusing on Olive Schreiner's use of fragmented allegory to experiment with alternative temporalities and thereby inscribe progressive arguments relating to empire. It suggests, however, that Laura Chrisman reads the broken 'Mumboo-jumbow idol' not in terms of allegory, but in terms of the totalising effects of the symbol. The chapter reviews Fredric Jameson's national allegory and his mapping of the relationship between modernism and imperialism, have in common their fragmented aesthetics. It concludes with a consideration of Ralph Waldo Emerson's uneven maturation in the two central chapters of the novel, 'Times and Seasons' and 'Waldo's Stranger', in relation to Jameson's work on national allegory, in order to show how the uneven psychological development of Waldo allegorises and critiques the processes and effects of colonisation on South Africa. Jameson's arguments reveal how the uneven imperialist dynamics of capitalist modernity create abyssal chasms that are represented in modernist forms.
