The Interregnum of Ownership in July’s People

Abstract

When Nadine Gordimer takes the Smales family to the South African bush in flight from a revolution they support, she deliberately invokes for the first time in her career the Heart of Darkness pattern of colonialist fiction. Marooned in an alien culture, the identities of the white liberals disintegrate, their morality and their language rendered impotent before the returned gaze of the black servant and the political paradoxes of black revolution. Gordimer’s rewriting of this story accomplishes a number of important political reversals, beginning with the fact that the whites appear as dependent refugees rather than as imperialist adventurers; throughout the novel the old white fictions that control colonialist representations — fictions of adventure, ethnography, rural development, miscegenation — are elicited, diminished and dismissed.¹