Abstract
The concept of mass dictatorship is a historical framework with which to analyse twentieth-century dictatorships from a transnational perspective; it challenges the developmental view of history by highlighting the fact that twentieth-century dictatorship regimes were part of a very modern project that found its roots in the nation-state, rather than a pre-modern political abnormality, and as such, they have been an inseparable part of the transnational formation of modernity. Furthermore, the concept of mass dictatorship aims at criticizing the antagonism of the past and present between, in most cases, national/cultural groupings around the world entrenched in the rigid dichotomy of ‘perpetrator vs. victim’. It also problematizes the simplistic understanding of power dynamics in the modern regime of the nation-state, and ultimately challenges the complacent stance towards the relationship between responsibility(-ies) and complicity(-ies). And there is more to it. This historical hypothesis tries to do something un-historical; it strongly urges us to ‘imagine’ in order to move beyond the closed dynamics between coercion (from above) and consent (from below). In other words, it puts a heavy emphasis on the role of imagination for us to think and act outside the ‘behemoth — a perfect tightly sutured political machine, which does not allow even a tiny space for dissent and resistance’.1
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Notes
Jie-Hyun Lim, ‘Series Introduction: Mapping Mass Dictatorship — Towards a Transnational History of Twentieth-Century Dictatorship’, in Jie-Hyun Lim and Karen Petrone (eds) Gender Politcs and Mass Dictatorship: Global Perspectives (England: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 14.
Nadine Gordimer, ‘Living in Interregnum’ in Stephen Clingman (ed.) The Essential Gesture: Writing, Politics and Places (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988), p. 266.
Lars Engle, ‘The Political Uncanny: The Novels of Nadine Gordimer’, Yale Journal of Criticism 2.2 (1989), p. 98.
Nadine Gordimer, The Pickup (U.S.A: Penguin Books, 2001), p. 40.
David Attwell and Barbara Harlow, ‘Introduction: South African Fiction After Apartheid’, Modern Fiction Studies 46.1 (2000), p. 2.
Afrikaner politicians and intellectuals employed a rhetoric of ‘race’ and ‘national identity’ that perhaps allows for (the least equivocal) analogies to be made between Afrikaner and Nazi Party ideology. Some scholars are more cautious about applying the fascist label to the National Party regime (1948–1994), but ‘the totalitarian character of NP hegemony and the obvious strength of racial ultranationalism among the politically dominant Afrikaners alone seem enough basis for a comparison’. See Susan Pearsall, ‘“Where the Banalities Are Enacted”: The Everyday in Gordimer’s Novels’, Research in African Literatures 31.1 (2000), p. 96.
Judie Newman, ‘Jump Starts: Nadine Gordimer after Apartheid’, in Nahem Yousaf (ed.) Apartheid Narratives (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2001), p. 22.
Neil Lazarus, ‘The South African Ideology: The Myth of Exceptionalism, the Idea of Renaissance’, The South Atlantic Quarterly 103.4 (2004), p. 624.
See John Saul, ‘Cry for the Beloved Country: The Post-Apartheid Denouement’, Monthly Review 52.8 (January 2001), pp. 1–51
Hein Marais, South Africa, Limits to Change: The Political Economy of Transformation (London: Zed, 1998)
Zine Magubane, ‘The Revolution Betrayed? Globalization, Neoliberalism, and the Post-Apartheid State’, The South Atlantic Quarterly 103.4 (2004), pp. 657–671
Alan Nasser, ‘The Tendency to Privatize’, Monthly Review 54.10 (March 2003), pp. 22–37
Jeremy Cronin, ‘Post-Apartheid South Africa: A Reply to John S. Saul’, Monthly Review 54.7 (December 2002), p. 38.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. xv.
Other critics such as Caren Kaplan and Pheng Cheah also, although in different contexts, point to the ‘ordered totality’ of current political terrain because of the way power, operating on the level of everyday life in a global context, invalidates the structure of the security and defensive capacity of an interiority, thus the outside/inside binary as well. See Caren Kaplan, ‘Precision Target: GPS and the Militarization of U.S. Consumer Identity’, American Quarterly 58.3 (2006), pp. 693–713
Pheng Cheah, ‘Crises of Money’, Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 16.1 (2008), pp. 189–219.
Michel Foucault, ‘What is Enlightenment?’ in Paul Rabinow (ed.) The Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon, 1984), p. 46.
Marc Redfield, ‘Imagi-Nation: The Imagined Community and the Aesthetics of Mourning’, Diacritics 29.4 (1999), p. 72.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), p. 127.
Henry Lefebvre and Christine Levich, ‘The Everyday and Everydayness’, Yale French Studies 73 (1987), p. 7
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© 2013 Seonjoo Park
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Park, S. (2013). Politics, Imagination and Everyday Life in Nadine Gordimer’s The Pickup. In: Schoenhals, M., Sarsenov, K. (eds) Imagining Mass Dictatorships. Mass Dictatorship in the 20th Century. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137330697_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137330697_8
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