André Brink’s The Rights of Desire: Modernized Apartheid and the Inaudibility Of Liminal Voices under Repressive Surveillance

Abstract

This paper attempts to explore liminality in the lives of the post-apartheid ethnicities through Brink?s The Rights of Desire. Victor Turner?s theory of liminality will be used to enumerate liminal beings and situations. We endeavor to find out how Brink portrays ethnicities in regard to the existing liminal spaces. Ethnicities share a common pain which is the very truth of being a minority. Brink's narrative exemplifies the enmeshed characters within the sociopolitical whirlwind that has thrown the minorities off balance. The present paper comes up with this conclusion that although liminality is supposed to be a temporary phase, it has become an integral component of South Africa and its ethnicities. The seed of apartheid is that deeply planted. It demands a long time for its roots to be perished. Apartheid has just been modernized and not devastated. Consequently, post-apartheid South Africa just like apartheid becomes a communitas or an anti-structured entity in which the political transition of power in 1994 does not change anything in regard to the lives of its ethnicities.

DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2016.v7n5p287