“Per omnia saecula saeculorum” or “Inkaba yakho iphi?”: Indigeneity in Alex La Guma and Aidan Higgins

Abstract

"Both Alex La Guma, in relation to South Africa, and Aidan Higgins, in relation to Ireland, stress a vital relationship between subjectivity and territory. Both also vividly bond social consciousness to an indigenous sense of rootedness in place, and for both it is a place of ancestors from which subjectivity emerges and to which it returns. This surprises given the metaphysical rather than materialist concepts with which this figuration aligns. They also share a complex decolonizing vision contextualized in both instances by the Marxist understandings of class and settler colonialism that shaped postcolonial discourses of the 1960s. Hence, this article draws on theories of indigeneity in contrast to theories of social conflict based on class to consider the importance of situatedness and belonging in two colonial and postcolonial novels of South Africa and Ireland."