Constellated in a flash: on the dialectics of seeing (beyond stasis) in Zoë Wicomb’s work

Abstract

This essay considers the photograph as representation and metaphor in select work by Zoë Wicomb (b. 1948). It asks how the photograph functions in her prose fiction and criticism in service of a recuperation of late- and postapartheid stasis in potentially affirmative vein. Many of Wicomb’s most illuminating essays and many of her fictions – from her debut, You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town (1987), to the most recent, Still Life (2020) – engage with photographs, drawing in highly suggestive ways on vivid descriptions of acts of seeing that are indebted to photographic theory. What, I ask, is constellated in the moment captured in the photograph represented in Wicomb’s fiction, as well as in the moment of engagement with the image – by her characters, or by Wicomb herself (including as critic)? How does the photograph function in Wicomb’s reimagination of the possibilities for ethical engagement with otherness beyond the stasis of South Africa’s long post-transition, post-postapartheid moment?