Mandisa Haarhoff
Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature

This paper turns to crime farm literature in post-apartheid South Africa, the trope of the Black as intruder, and the renegotiation of whiteness and Khoe indigeneity as intimately related. I ask, what does the emergence of the farm crime literary genre alongside South Africa’s land reformation process and the white genocide movement contribute to post-apartheid discourse on indigeneity? How does the farm function as a site for the staging of sovereignty and belonging in post-apartheid South Africa?  I interrogate the reemergence of the 1980s anxiety of the Black peril and the contemporary depiction of the ‘Bantu’ as settler adjacent invaders.