White natives? Dan Roodt, Afrikaner identity and the politics of the sublime

Abstract

The aesthetic of the sublime and its political effects have not been investigated extensively in postcolonial studies. In the case of South Africa, it has been deemed - following an influential argument by J.M. Coetzee -to have played a minor role. Yet the evocation of landscape as sublime is significant for understanding the complex processes of identity formation that are involved in particular instances of colonial settlement. This article pays attention to a troubling version of the sublime evident in the controversial Afrikaans-language activist Dan Roodt's evocations of the Karoo landscape. In Roodt's writing, the sublime can be read as an attempt to deal with the otherness not only of the landscape, but also of its inhabitants. It tends, in his case, to have a dehistoricizing effect in questioning the autochthony of local black inhabitants of the landscape while uneasily attempting to assert white rights over it. Copyright © 2006 SAGE Publications.