In this reflection on his recently published book, Hedley Twidle explores historical and theoretical approaches to the question of non-fiction in South African literature. Experiments with Truth reads the country's transition as refracted through an array of documentary modes that are simultaneously refashioned and blurred into each other: long-form analytic journa...

In this reflection on his recently published book, Hedley Twidle explores historical and theoretical approaches to the question of non-fiction in South African literature. Experiments with Truth reads the country's transition as refracted through an array of documentary modes that are simultaneously refashioned and blurred into each other: long-form analytic journa...

This piece is drawn from a larger project that asks what it might mean to write a cultural history or "biography" of the longest highway in South Africa, the N2. Influenced by literature on the everyday, on infrastructures and the "infra-ordinary," my approach pays attention to the highway as a material artefact. Who builds, maintains and manages it; who makes thei...

This piece explores recent literary re-creations of the early Dutch East India Company (VOC) years at the Cape of Good Hope, concentrating on Dan Sleigh's Eilande (2002, trans. André Brink, 2005) to examine how an archivist turned novelist uses the textual ‘islands’ provided by official documentation to create a huge prose work that is remarkable for placing the se...