Representations of the National and Transnational in Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow

Abstract

As creative agents of knowledge production in the domain of humanities knowledge, South African writers such as Phaswane Mpe have the historical burden of participating in the transformation of knowledge in ways that revolutionize the role of artistic performance with a view to prompting social transformation. In our context, Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to our Hillbrow (2001) actively generates emergent grammars that underpin a transformational thrust through a distinctive transnational bent, where xenophobia and rural myopia are countered through a deliberative narrative of doubt cast on a putative insular South African-ness pitted against master narratives of national unity, on the one hand, and disruptive vectors such as HIV/AIDS and witchcraft, on the other. As a significant discourse that constitutes humanities knowledge, a novel such as Mpe’s contributesto a project’s transformation of knowledge in its departure from, and disavowal of, a totalizing master narrative of nationalism, putting in place a macabre post-national struggle of dystopia. It specifically tests the limits knowledge production and consumption around the topical issues of HIV/AIDS and immigration. It proceeds to show how Phaswane Mpe’s novel has successfully debunked myths of a privileged autochthonous habitus. The novel eschews characterising unstable homologies of the rural and urban divide and, in like manner, the South African and ‘foreigner’ bar, as a starting point for meaningful knowledge transformation about immigration and the HIV/ AIDS stigma through transnationalism and transculturation of language by way of an idiom of intertextuality represented by a transnational bent. We demonstrate throughout that transnationalism prompts a signifcation of cultural transformation in the novel under discussion, viz. Welcome to our Hillbrow.