Love in the time of South Africa on queer present continuous be(com)ing in Barbara Adair's in tangier we killed the blue parrot and end

Abstract

The cultural imaginary in South Africa is, as Ashraf Jamal contends in Predicaments of Culture in South Africa, still imprisoned within boundaries of difference established by the past and still insists on rigid notions of the “national”. For this reason, the South African cultural imaginary is unable to imaginatively engage with that which is unthinkable and unnameable in order to overcome the moral determinism that has burdened critical considerations of cultural production. To this end, Jamal proposes a rethinking of the human in South Africa in the name of love, one means of which is a reinvigoration of the notion of queer. In this dissertation, I will consider the ways in which Barbara Adair articulates a queer present continuous be(com)ing in her two novels In Tangier We Killed the Blue Parrot and End, which enables me not only to explore the potentialities of realising and sustaining an indeterminate in-between space in which the self and the other are able to renounce the need to know in order to begin to come toward one another, but also to open a space for reimagining frameworks for understanding literary production in South Africa.