Squirming White Bodies: Interracial Encounters in Anton Kannemeyer's “True Love” and Ivan Vladislavić's The Restless Supermarket

This article explores some of the ways in which “whiteness” as a set of discourses is being revised in the post-apartheid cultural imagination. Through a reading of a comic strip by Anton Kannemeyer and of Ivan Vladislavić's novel The Restless Supermarket (2001), the article considers specifically the manner in which performances of whiteness are represented as responding to the pressures felt at the site of the post-apartheid interracial encounter. The feverishness with which discourses of white masculinity are either disavowed or aggressively reinforced (in the case of Kannemeyer and Vladislavić's texts respectively), indicate that postapartheid revisions of (white) identity work to a variety of ends and continue to play out around uncertainties about the meanings of race. The article considers some of the strategies of translation used in moments of interracial contact, and argues that potentially ethical and responsible performances of whiteness can only take shape if the singularity of the racially and culturally coded “other” is brought to bear on the epistemological certainties of white self-imagining.