“The island is not a story in itself”: apartheid’s world literature

This paper makes two related claims: first I argue that the trope of the island works as a hieroglyph of the apartheid state's disavowal of Robben Island and all that it represented; and secondly, I illustrate how the texts under analysis also configure the apartheid state as the disavowed of the international community. To do this, I discuss Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona's The Island (1973) and J.M. Coetzee's Foe (1986), both of which thematize South African economic and moral isolation through the trope of the island. Both these texts dramatize the moral conditions of life under apartheid within a distinctly transnational frame. As such, I argue, they de-territorialize apartheid and read it as folded-in to its global moment.