Fracture and Selfhood in Jacob Dlamini's Native Nostalgia

The article attempts to interrogate formations of the self in post-apartheid black writing. Drawing on Jacob Dlamini's Native Nostalgia, it traces mutable formations of the black subject across temporalities and spatialities. Following Theodor Adorno's dialectics of non-identity (1972), I argue that emphasis on the historical and locational particularities of township life need not result in homogenising identity politics, and that Native Nostalgia points the way to constellations of the self that are radically open.