ABSTRACT
Zoe Wicomb's writing encourages a revisiting of Edward Said's formulation. Rather than producing what Said presents as the contrapuntal vision of the exile, it comes to assemble a provincial-cosmopolitan point of view that articulates a translocal voice. This voice issues from a conjoined perspective that is located, simultaneously, here and there, and which recognises both the limits of the local as well as the ways in which the provincial point of view can also challenge the orthodoxies of the cosmopolitan. It emerges across Wicomb's oeuvre. In particular productive linguistic redirection for Wicomb, and evokes another informing this study – that which is elucidated in Sigmund Freud's essay 'The Uncanny'. After the publication of her first book – which some received as an autobiographical reconstruction of home – Wicomb expressed irritation with the assumption that 'black women are… incapable of artifice' and can only present 'authentic experience'.
