Reading nostalgia and beyond: the hermeneutics of suspicion and race; and, learning to read, again, with Zoë Wicomb

Abstract

Nudged into a new interpretive approach by a comment in her most recent novel, this essay presents an account of reading Wicomb’s fiction that seeks to move beyond what Ricoeur describes as a “hermeneutics of suspicion,” and that responds to it rather as a gathering in which reader and text are mutually composed. Informed by Sedgwick’s distinction between “paranoid” and “reparative” reading, Best and Marcus’s “surface reading” and, particularly, Felski’s “postcritical” and Barthes’s earlier “expressive” reading, it follows Nuttall in locating questions of “how we read now” in a South African context that is framed by race. Drawing on Fanon and Latour, it thus charts how Wicomb’s fiction dislodges race from a “matter of fact” by moving readers to respond to it instead as a “matter of concern” that, for all its fabrication, does things, and thus demands our care.

Keywords: Critique, colouredness, actor-network theory, thing theory, David’s Story, October