Abstract
This chapter reads South African author Ivan Vladislavić’s novel Double Negative as an interrogation of settler-colonial food culture. Eating habits and foodways reveal a tension between self-indigenising and self-Europeanising settlerhood. The novel presents the braai (South African barbecue) and the cafetière (or “French Press”) as the material markers of these two identity functions, possible only under an epistemic regime which perceives being “African” and being “worldly” as antithetical. This chapter provides overviews of South African cuisine following European settlement and of grilling practices across settler-colonial contexts to argue that gastronomic male camaraderie is intimately tied to the creation of waste which remains in place after the eating is over. Conversely, the exacting standards of refined dining, which demands multiple adjectives and parenthetical enumerations, maintain justification of the settler minority’s privileged position over indigenous peoples. The chapter thus ultimately asserts that genres of material comfort are endemic to being- and becoming-sovereign in the South African context and that Vladislavić’s attention to grilled meats and coffee pots is his potentially unsettling point of entry into his readers’ homes and their own potential implication in colonial legacies.
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Notes
- 1.
Though the point of the colony was the production of supplies as well as a port for maintenance and administration, many ingredients of the settlers’ diets continued being imported. Among these, a British agriculturalist writing in 1905 counted “(1) Dairy produce and eggs, (2) fresh meat and poultry, (3) fodder of all sorts, (4) salted fish and smoked meat, (5) vegetables and fruit. Besides these, but not included in this paper, we have preserved meat, vegetables and fish; dried fruits, not being currants, raisins, or figs; tinned and bottled fruits, and butterine, all of which are not, strictly speaking, producible in the Colony, although they take the place in a great measure of goods produced here”. To these he added the imported foods which “nature prevents our growing, such as rice, sugar, coffee and spice” (Nobbs 1905).
- 2.
Such were the cases of the “Pebco Three”, whose torturers enjoyed a braai while they were “interrogating” them and whose bodies were subsequently burned and thrown in a river; of an activist known in the transcripts as T. Mvudle, who was branded with a meat fork used for braaing (TRC Hearings 11–14 November 1996); and of Charity Kondile, who testified how notorious murderer Dirk Coetzee “braaied” her son (qtd in Krog 2000, 307). Journalist and author Antjie Krog, who covered the TRC proceedings, recalls that a fellow writer complained that he does not want to use such language that mixes “breakfast and blood” (Krog 45).
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Tal, N. (2022). “A Manly Amount of Wreckage”: South African Food Culture and Settler Belonging in Ivan Vladislavić’s Double Negative. In: Ranta, R., Colás, A., Monterescu, D. (eds) ‘Going Native?'. Food and Identity in a Globalising World. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96268-5_10
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