Autobiography, History, Memory and Nostalgia in Denis Beckett's Radical Middle and Hugh Lewin's Stones Against the Mirror

Radical Middle and Stones Against the Mirror are responses to, and products of, what are perceived as threatening socio-political conditions and an uncertain literary context in post-apartheid South Africa, alongside the enduring traditional conceptualisation of an autobiographical self. Despite the fact that both writers display high levels of self-reflexivity, their narratives still demand to be read as autobiographies and not as mere autobiographical novels. Both narratives allow us to apply Vess et al.'s assertion that nostalgia ‘is a self-relevant emotion coloured with positive affective qualities and potential self-relevant benefits’ for the subject displaying it.1 During the apartheid years, South African anti-apartheid autobiographers seemed confident about the object they wanted their narratives to apprehend and comprehend. However, the latest offerings by Beckett and Lewin, as representative of an epochal shift, suggest that the former anti-apartheid activist autobiographer operates in a confusingly uncertain terrain. The personal is no longer just put in the service of a collective political struggle. It has become a site for exploring the entanglements of the private self in South Africa's chequered past, anxious present and threatening future.