In Anticipation of Tomorrow: Globalisation and ‘Transnation’ in Serote’s <i>History is the Home Address</i>

Abstract

In view of the collapse of institutional apartheid, post-liberation South African literature can be appropriately limned as literature of return, going by the preponderance of its engagement with exile in the years of the struggle. I read Mongane Wally Serote’s History is the Home Address (2004) against the backdrop of migration, paying attention to the way the poem anticipates what should be the right attitude of those it may affect, especially with respect to the nation-state. I argue that the assumptions of this anticipation are true for South Africa as they are for all other postcolonial African states. While privileging the idea of space and time, my position in this paper benefits significantly from Bill Ashcroft’s concept of “transnation” and the way it makes for the inadequacies of the notion of diaspora and other similarly configured abstractions