The ruins of the rural idyll: reconfiguring the image of the farm in Homeland and Five Fingers for Marseilles

Abstract

The symbolic importance of the image of the farm in South African cultural imaginaries can hardly be overestimated, even today. Historically placed at the nexus of the dualism between commercial agricultural areas and the communal areas of the Bantustans, farms are still deeply marked by the processes of colonisation and dispossession that made them possible. The material and symbolic infrastructures associated with the farm continue to sort access to the rural as idyllic and turn the farm into what Stoler has termed “imperial debris.” In this article, I will analyse how Karin Brynard’s novel Homeland and Michael Matthews’ film Five Fingers for Marseilles stage images of ruined farms that nudge audiences away from the “love and ownership of the farm” as one of the privileged scenes of South African rurality. How do these two texts use the farm to draw attention to the disastrous tracks rural idylls, in their (neo)liberal, capitalistic and (neo)colonial guises, have left in the contemporary moment? What kind of rural futures, livelihoods and landscapes can be gauged from the farm in ruin?.