From apartheid to the planetary present: breaching time in Nadine Gordimer’s “Something Out There”

ABSTRACT A central problem in the Anthropocene, according to Rob Nixon, is the representational difficulty involved in rendering forms of injustice legible across different scales of time. This paper argues that Nadine Gordimer’s work can be read as a sustained narrative experiment with dissonant temporalities, and hence that it lays the groundwork for a social critique that extends beyond the limits of apartheid South Africa into the disjunctive planetary present. Her novella “Something Out There,” which intertwines the story of a baboon on the loose in 1980s Johannesburg with a revolutionary plot to blow up a power station, is the focus of my essay. I draw on Homi Bhabha and Benedict Anderson to describe the temporal paradigm of white suburbia in Gordimer’s Johannesburg, and read the baboon as a figure of social critique amid that peculiar modern timescape. The part of the narrative concerning the revolutionaries, I argue, advances the critique by pointing to alternative structurings of time in materialist or more-than-human terms. Perspectives on temporality from Gareth Dale, Michael Hanchard and Dipesh Chakrabarty, among others, sustain my conclusion that Gordimer’s stylistic accommodation of alternative timescales gives her work a compelling resonance in our uncertain and unequal planetary present.