Zoë Wicomb's Ghosts. Uncanny Translocations in David's Story and The One That Got Away

Richter, Virginia (2011). Zoë Wicomb's Ghosts. Uncanny Translocations in David's Story and The One That Got Away. Safundi - the journal of South African and American studies, 12(3-4), pp. 373-388. Colchester, UK: Taylor & Francis 10.1080/17533171.2011.586835

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This essay analyses Zoë Wicomb's novel David's Story and her latest collection of short stories, The One That Got Away, through the lense of cosmopolitanism and Jacques Derrida's concept of ‘hauntology’. Wicomb is a cosmopolitan author in a very precise sense: an author who embeds locally specific stories in a complex intertextual, historical and transnational web of cross-references. As settings, characters and objects move between Scotland and South Africa, it appears that the histories of these countries are mutually haunted by each other. Uncanny encounters with the past, and with memorials and art objects that take on a spectral quality, evoke an increasing sense of disorientation on the part of protagonists and readers alike. Assumptions about place, history and identity are thus constantly undermined and reconfigured.

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