ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an analysis of an apparently little-known single short story written by Zoë Wicomb and published in South on South: An Anthology Devoted to the Humanity and Narrative of Migration (2011). Entitled “Raising the Tone” and in line with the anthology’s titular premise, the story contributes to exploring and delineating the experiential narratives of global migration. More strikingly, it does so in ways that complicate the predominant South African/Scottish ethno-national and geographic dualistic coordinates that typically animate and preoccupy established Wicomb scholarship. In a decolonial reading of “Raising the Tone,” this essay illustrates the story’s commitment to decentring an established, primarily Eurocentric Western episteme whose universalism obscures the historic, ideological and material contributions of former colonies to global modernity. Demonstrating how the story presumes a critical engagement with these particular thematics of global South, postcolonial diaspora – whose cosmopolitan provisionality affords alternative, counter-hegemonic and counter-discursive ontologies – the essay reinterprets her fiction within a broadly African diasporic paradigm. This is in order not just to provide more diverse – inclusive and expansive – ways of reading the author but to advance further prospects for her fiction’s own itinerant decolonial impulses, both aesthetic and ethical.
