Representations of rhizomatic identitarian trajectories in selected contemporary Southern African narratives

Abstract

The subject of identity is a very complex one as highlighted by the amount of scholarship on this topic as well as a varied range of perspectives that have been used to approach it. Probably, it is because identity is a life-long process that it continues to take new forms and new directions through deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation, the ‘lines of flight’ from Deleuze and Guattari’s vocabulary. Furthermore, identification takes place in a web of complex and multiple dis/connections hence, identity is neither a fixed nor a complete “assemblage” but rather an on-going troubled process of “becoming”. These are provocative ideas that demand renewed conversations to (re)consider conceptualisations of identity in the context of persistent self-other logics and the fear of difference in contemporary times in which displacement, migration and mobility inform the processes of “becoming” in fictional narratives. From rhizomatic conceptualisations, the present article takes interest in how post-colonial subjects engage in “becoming” and the fluid, contested and precarious identities they carve as portrayed in selected Southern African literary texts.