ABSTRACT
The Afrocentrism of the immediate post-apartheid era is again present in 2006's episodic novel Portrait with Keys: Joburg & what-what. Portrait with Keys traces how Africa came to the suburbs in both nice and less nice ways. Svetlana Boym's The Future of Nostalgia would understand Vladislavic's critical nostalgia as an immigrant's desire to feel at home, whilst simultaneously resisting assimilation in order to retain a previous identity. Vladislavic's antidote to alienation works at both an intellectual level via the reestablishment of connection between body and place, but also at an affective level. Behind Vladislavic's suggestion that critical nostalgia is one way to find “a place for the past in the present” is the sense that time is a continual unfolding. The current creations of humanity are revealed by nature as so many pentimenti, so many palimpsestic fashions (Huyssen).
