ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the depiction of Vera Stark in Nadine Gordimer’s novel None to Accompany Me (1994), which represents South Africa’s transition to democracy, along with the portrait of Tshepo in K. Sello Duiker’s The Quiet Violence of Dreams (2001), a novel that dramatises urban life after the supposed accomplishment of that transition. I argue that both novels evince a queer sensibility that attempts to move beyond normative identity boundaries, particularly the boundaries that demarcate sexuality and gender. Still, Duiker’s novel imagines a world in which racial and national boundaries are also fundamentally fluid, while Gordimer’s book cannot conceptualise a future without rigid boundaries demarking racial difference and national identity. Duiker’s novel ultimately expresses a queerer outlook than Gordimer’s, insisting on the instability of identity and its refusal to reinscribe identity boundaries opens a conceptual space where solidarities across sexuality, gender, nation, and race can form. Such a space can energise queer collectives grounded, as Cathy Cohen (1997) contends, in a shared relationship to dominant modes of power rather than in a shared history or identity, and these forms of solidarity appear vital to establishing a more sustainable future not only in South Africa but also across the continent.
