Paper short abstract:

In grappling with the unrealised hopes of the postapartheid present, Masande Ntshanga's 2019 novel Triangulum employs an enfolded narrative emplotment where dystopian past and apocalyptic future converge. Yet the inevitability of past and future is also prised open, offering a hope in a minor mode.

Paper long abstract:

The horizons of expectation for postapartheid South Africa have collapsed: the present is increasingly at odds with the future that was hoped for during antiapartheid struggles, and anticipated as imminent at the advent of democracy in 1994. Instead of the future overcoming the past, the present is instead haunted by unhealed past injustices. This growing apprehension has ushered in a burgeoning body of literature that grapples with the nation’s unrealised hopes and tries to make sense of a new temporal-affective orientation that I refer to in my work as ‘after-hope’.

In this paper, I present this temporal porosity by way of an engagement with Masande Ntshanga’s 2019 speculative fiction novel Triangulum, which presents a South Africa of enfolded and converging temporalities, where colonial, apartheid, and neoliberal pasts are enfolded into the novel’s present in 2043 as it anticipates an apocalyptic event that is prophesied to take place in 2050. With its recursive narrative emplotment, the events of the dystopian past already bear echoes of the dystopian future. Focusing on the anticipated apocalypse, I draw parallels between the novel’s prophecy and that of the nineteenth century anticolonial Xhosa prophetess Nongqawuse to argue that Triangulum prises open both the colonial apocalypse of the past and the apocalypse of the future. It offers a hope, if in a minor mode, for a future yet to be imagined or realised by writing and simultaneously ‘un-writing’ South Africa’s history as an extended dystopia, resisting the inevitability of either hope or apocalypse.