“A Manly Amount of Wreckage”: South African Food Culture and Settler Belonging in Ivan Vladislavić’s Double Negative

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.