Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the various depictions and discussions about desire across racial boundaries that are carried out in the early 20th-century South African novel Margaret Harding (1911) by Perceval Gibbon.

Paper long abstract:

One of the most explosive cultural and social debates in South Africa in the 1920s was the discussion about interracial sexual relationships triggered by the publication of William Plomer’s novel Turbott Wolfe (1925) which centred a relationship between a white man and a black woman. However, already fourteen years earlier Perceval Gibbon published the novel Margaret Harding (Flower o’ the Peach) which also portrayed interracial desire. This presentation will focus on the different ways that Margaret Harding depicts desire across racial boundaries, varying from opaque depictions of homoerotically-inflected gazes between men to the novel’s central friendship between a white woman and a black man which teeters on the edge of becoming a love affair. Prompted by the novel’s own engagement with early 20th-century thought on race and desire, the literary close reading will be considered in relation to this context while also drawing on 21st-century South African theory on the topic, primarily Zimitri Erasmus’s Race Otherwise (2017). What can reading a hundred year old text tell us about race and racial conviviality in South Africa today?