Paper short abstract:

This paper critically analyses queer futurity, mysticism and the subject of post-apartheid freedom in K. Sello Duiker’s The Quiet Violence of Dreams through a Lacanian reading of the novel’s ekphrastic representation, fraternity and its critique of the libidinal and political economies of Cape Town.

Paper long abstract:

There is by now an established current in the critical reception of K. Sello Duiker’s The Quiet Violence of Dreams (2001), that focuses on the novel’s representation of queer futurity and critique of the hegemonic and heteronormative order of post-apartheid (as well as global) social relations. What remains missing in this latter commentary on the novel is a critical appreciation for the ways in which the problematic of futurity needs to be considered not only as a discrete question of the temporality and spatiality of post-apartheid freedom. That is, through the gaze of queer mysticism, the novel imagines queer futurity at the intersection of the libidinal, spatial and political economies of Cape Town. In a Lacanian reading of the novel’s appropriation of the art of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood for the constitution of queer fraternity, and its critique of the economies of male prostitution in the city, the essay argues that the mystic and aesthetic reproduction of the subject of post-apartheid freedom evinced by the novel, should not be uncritically celebrated as sufficient critique of the quiet violence of the deferred dream of liberation.