Disgrace as Critical Campus Fiction

Disgrace has often been read as a postapartheid national allegory, a bleak rebuke to a euphoric state-sponsored narrative of the New South Africa and its political promise in the late 1990s.Footnote ⁴ In the first six chapters of the novel, that story gets told by way of a campus plot. The country’s tumultuous political transition is felt by protagonist David Lurie solely in terms of its impact on his professional life: “As part of the great rationalization,” David’s institution has been downgraded in status from a university proper to a technical college, and his own position has been demoted from “professor of modern languages” to “adjunct professor of communications.”Footnote ⁵ David spends little time ruminating on current affairs, but clearly understands both himself and his university as victims of the late-twentieth-century global turn to a more instrumentalized, market-based model of higher education that took hold in South Africa at the same time as—and very much as part of—the country’s postapartheid restructuring.Footnote ⁶ Although South Africa’s “great rationalization” in fact represented a significant curtailment of the liberatory promises of and by the ANC government—an abandonment of a vision of universities as sites of “radical political inclusion and economic redistribution”Footnote ⁷—David is most conscious of how the university’s longstanding humanist mission, and the faculty once tasked with carrying it out, have become fossilized relics, “clerks in a post-religious age.”Footnote ⁸

David’s institutional disaffection aligns quite closely with a late 1990s North American critical discourse on universities, now a subfield all its own within which Bill Readings’s The University in Ruins, published just two years before Disgrace, serves as something of an urtext.Footnote ⁹ The corporatized millennial university, which Readings describes as globalized and therefore Americanized,Footnote ¹⁰ has much in common with David’s own Cape Technical College, as both are subject to the same global political economy of late capitalism. Coopted by the logic of the market and estranged from its former role in the development of national culture, the university has abandoned its older, humanities-based model of canonicity in favor of instrumentalized curricula built around fields such as composition studies and cultural studies. This shift, in Readings’s view, is a symptom of the emergence of a new hegemonic institution whose exploitative structure has not only survived the transformation of the humanities but may even have become stronger as a result of that transformation—more difficult to detect, distill, and name as such. Coetzee clearly builds on this analysis in his own brief published commentaries on the university, in which he identifies the institution’s cooption by global capitalism as also necessarily an extension and reconfiguration of empire, “a process of intellectual colonization … that is far more massive and totalising than anything Victorian England could muster,”Footnote ¹¹ and casts the reconfigured, decanonized “skill set” version of humanities education as the result of a new imperialism.Footnote ¹² In Coetzee’s account multicultural curricula, ostensibly created in order to decolonize the academy, instead dehistoricize the humanities in service of the millennial university’s transnational political economy and are no more inherently liberatory than Eurocentric canon they have superseded.

An intellectually bankrupt postapartheid university serves as the backdrop and precondition for Disgrace’s first major plot event, David’s exploitative affair with a student that leads to a university disciplinary hearing and ultimately his exit from both the university and Cape Town. Recently dumped by Soraya, an “exotic” prostitute he had been seeing regularly, David channels his extra time and energy into a new book on the infamously promiscuous Lord Byron, a project for which he presumably will receive little or no professional credit, but which allows him to continue going through the motions of the kind of academic career most familiar to him. It is after spending a full day in the library that he first flirts with Melanie Isaacs, a student in his romanticism course, in the university gardens. Rita Barnard has observed the significance of this sequencing of events: David’s demotion serves as “the carefully constructed preamble to their relationship” that “suggests a transference of thwarted pedagogical desire towards the purely sexual.”Footnote ¹³

A particular kind of student best facilitates this transference for David. His attraction to Melanie has much to do with her racial otherness (“close-cropped black hair, wide, almost Chinese cheekbones, large dark eyes”).Footnote ¹⁴ But equally important are her intellectual mediocrity and passivity, established in the text before her physical features are described.Footnote ¹⁵ When pressed by David to explain her interest in his romanticism elective, the best she can come up with is that “I took Shakespeare last year,”Footnote ¹⁶ and he more or less stumps her when he inquires about her “literary passions”: “We did Adrienne Rich and Toni Morrison in my second year. And Alice Walker. I got pretty involved. But I wouldn’t call it a passion exactly.”Footnote ¹⁷ Whatever else the new, rationalized curriculum (peppered with African American but apparently no African authors) has done for students, it has not given new life to the affective and intellectual intensity that David associates with humanist study. But while in the classroom this tepidity and passivity vexes him, in the bedroom it proves instead a source of excitement. This, as much as non-whiteness, links Melanie to Soraya, whom David thinks of as a “ready learner, compliant, pliant.”Footnote ¹⁸ If as a teacher David has limited powers of inspiration, in his sexual affairs he wields professorial authority over student bodies whose ambivalent response to his desire is for him less a troubling enigma and more an incentive to keep demanding more. In Melanie’s case, “more” eventually means rape, the narrative’s free indirect discourse protestations that it is “not quite that” aside.Footnote ¹⁹

When Melanie files a sexual harassment complaint, David is subjected to a hearing by the university disciplinary committee—a scene that is easily read as an allegory for South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Yet as David Attwell notes, the administrative procedure David is subjected to has much more in common with the one that was on the books at the University of Cape Town, Coetzee’s own institutional home in the 1990s, than it does with the TRC, which, among other things, did not require perpetrators to express remorse.Footnote ²⁰ Of course, the university’s policies are nonetheless both analogous to and an explicit extension of state power. The humanistic veneer of the institution and its bureaucratic procedures masks and even facilitates its more important function of postapartheid and neoliberal governmentality by other means.Footnote ²¹ Ostensibly marking the institution’s newfound commitment to diversity and equity, the disciplinary committee is designed to contain Melanie’s complaint as much as it is meant to address it: the anticipated outcome of the hearing is David’s successful and palatable reincorporation into the university, and there is little to suggest that it will prevent students from being similarly exploited (by David or others) in the future. By choosing to resign rather than issue the pro forma apology offered to him as a way out and through, David ironically thwarts this presumed outcome and stages some form of protest against the Kafkaesque show of institutional force for which the committee stands.

In telling a story about how the contemporary university works through a plot centered around a faculty-student affair and the institution’s response thereto, Disgrace adheres closely to the conventions of late-twentieth-century campus fiction from the global north, a subgenre in which the aging white male professor who sleeps with a female student is not merely a frequent plot among many; it is the plot around which this genre registers and critiques the erosion of the status and material privilege of the white male humanities faculty member in a corporatized university and, more generally, in a post-Clintonian, post-industrial society.Footnote ²² In North American campus fiction, that critique is usually satirical and lighthearted, featuring students who enter into relationships with their professors willingly, sometimes even coercing them into intimacy and then weaponize campus sexual harassment policy after the affairs are underway. Despite the reality of the one-directional power dynamics of most student-faculty sexual relationships, and how those affairs serve to perpetuate a toxic and sometimes even violent climate for women and minorities on campus, even the most savvy of US-based campus novels tend not to dwell on those consequences; instead they extend readers’ sympathies to the flawed male protagonists who unwittingly get entangled in such relationships.Footnote ²³ They may even invite us to laugh at the situation.

Whatever else Disgrace asks its readers to do with David Lurie’s affair with Melanie, it does not invite us to laugh. Melanie’s sexual assault is deeply unsettling to read, and when David’s daughter Lucy is gang raped further along in the story the implicit violence of what David thinks of as at worst an inappropriate student-faculty affair becomes more legible. Reflecting on the rarity with which US academic fiction deals with rape in her survey of the genre, Elaine Showalter declares, “The great American novel about [the] particular campus trauma [of sexual harassment] has yet to be written.”Footnote ²⁴ We might, then, identify Disgrace’s very different approach to this topic as an index of the text’s postcoloniality. Transplanted from the middle-class United States to postapartheid South Africa, the sexual harassment plot turns especially ugly, and a literary rendering of a student-teacher affair cannot not be about an abuse of power.

Yet the novel’s perspectival centering of a white, male, middle-aged professor, no matter how canny, is entirely in keeping with US campus fiction—as well, to an extent, as critical university studies, a field that was established in the late 1990s and early 2000s by mainly tenured white men whose recollection of the “golden age” of American universitiesFootnote ²⁵ is difficult to fully disaggregate from that subject position.Footnote ²⁶ The plight of the twenty-first-century academy reads very differently to those who historically enjoyed far less privilege within it.Footnote ²⁷ The bleakness of Coetzee’s presentation of the university in this novel is bleak in the way that it is because the university that has so coldly instrumentalized David Lurie and the intellectual project for which he stood was an institution that he once believed in and that was once designed for him.

Other types of campus constituents, namely women and students (who by the late 1990s were predominantly non-white), are far less extensively described in Disgrace, and their presentation reveals quite a bit of narrative ambivalence about the problem of how differently the university is experienced by those outside of the ranks of the faculty. The most fully fleshed out female faculty member, Farodia Rassool, is chair of the university’s committee on discrimination, and to a certain extent her contributions to the disciplinary hearing are genuinely disruptive. Forgetting or ignoring that the committee cannot “impose the severest penalty”Footnote ²⁸ (or indeed any penalty at all) on David, and, “in a voice quivering with righteousness,” Rassool cuts through the cautious administrative language of her largely himpatheticFootnote ²⁹ colleagues to name what no one else in the room will: the “abuse of a young woman,” “the pain [David] has caused,” and “the long history of exploitation of which this is a part.”Footnote ³⁰ Thwarting the committee’s function as a means of damage control, Rassool becomes the lone voice in search of something akin to retributive justice for Melanie. The public apology proposed as David’s punishment has no necessary relationship with real remorse or personal transformation, and Rassool alone insists that these things should be necessary components of institutional as well as personal accountability.

Yet Coetzee’s depiction of Rassool’s character borders on caricature, and her outsized anger and desire for vengeance, which casts her as an uncritically rendered feminist killjoy,Footnote ³¹ are emblematic of the text’s broader antipathy toward campus activism and feminism. A member of the campus group Women Against Rape (WAR) poses as a reporter outside the hearing and sets David up for a humiliating photograph that evokes what David Atwell identifies as a specifically Maoist form of shaming.Footnote ³² Although the novel certainly does not defend David’s treatment of Melanie, it also exhibits a deep suspicion of any kind of solidarity or organization among women as a necessary and potentially productive response to gendered violence on or off campus (there is no collective women’s response of any sort to what happens later to Lucy on the farm). Disgrace’s portrayal of campus feminism is of a piece with its pessimism about twenty-first-century institutions of higher education as sites of ethical, democratic engagement.

The same is true of Coetzee’s presentation of students as potential agents of change. David views most students as distressingly passive: “post-Christian, post historical, post literate”;Footnote ³³ they “look through him when he speaks, forget his name”Footnote ³⁴ and exhibit “no flash of revelation” at a Wordsworth lecture that presumably landed better a decade earlier.Footnote ³⁵ They are exemplary products of Paulo Freire’s banking model of education,Footnote ³⁶ hardly a source of unbridled political hope and inspiration for a new democracy. One crucial exception is Melanie’s boyfriend Ryan, who harasses David on campus at multiple points, offering up another, unofficial arena in which David might be brought to justice. Ryan’s tactics are juvenile—slashing tires, throwing spitballs, some verbal insults—but he looms large in David’s imagination, as is evidenced by the fact that we never learn how David learns Ryan’s name (when he first appears he is described only as Melanie’s boyfriend or “the boy”). He poses a physical threat to David, and his relationship with Melanie may also be abusive, aligning him with an anticolonial hypermasculinity akin to that of Lucy’s rapists. Like the WAR activist, Ryan presents as a student who seems to be “suffering from too much will,”Footnote ³⁷ prepared to enact a form of retributive justice against their teacher oppressors beyond the disciplinary structures of the university and the state.

But read slightly against the grain, Ryan also significantly complicates the novel’s comment on students. To begin with, Ryan isn’t actually a student: he is not officially enrolled in David’s romanticism class, which he crashes, and indeed it is not clear that he has any formal affiliation with the university at all. Although the students in the lecture Ryan attends seem to exemplify the passivity that David finds so dismaying, in fact their “silence” in this context is “dogged,” and it “organizes itself palpably around the stranger in their midst. They will not speak, they will not play his game, as long as a stranger is there to listen and judge and mock.”Footnote ³⁸ By bearing witness the enrolled students are in fact active participants in the performative protest that takes place in this scene. Ryan breaches university protocol and all the “rationalized” attention it pays to accounting, the quantification of humanities education; his presence in the room also challenges David’s identity as a humanist, which has diminished but still extant value in the structurally adjusted institution. Ryan’s disruption of David’s lecture calls into question some of the most basic assumptions about the university classroom: who is and isn’t allowed to occupy this academic space, who counts as a student, who holds real power within the institution.

In a novel whose ethical lessons depend so heavily on restricting the reader to the protagonist’s perspectival scope, Ryan creates a small but important opening through which to consider how the university is experienced by those without professorial privilege. Appearing in only a few brief scenes, Ryan is at best an enigma and at worst perhaps bolsters Coetzee’s pessimistic perspective on South Africa’s future: David learns and suffers very little from having spitballs thrown his way in the theater, and there is no affirmative vision of study or knowledge production, institutionalized or otherwise, that emerges through this character’s actions. But Ryan, and to an extent Farodia Rasool, lays bare the extent to which the nominally deracialized postapartheid university has done little to enact reparative or redistributive justice for its most vulnerable constituents. Through these characters, alternative ways of imagining the meaning of South Africa’s institutions of knowledge production in the postapartheid era haunt the margins of the text, troubling its professor-centric critique of the millennial, neoliberal university that is unable to imagine anything but bleak possibilities for postapartheid, postcolonial knowledge production and study.

Welcome to Our Hillbrow and the Radical Potential of the Student Precariat

Welcome to Our Hillbrow is less readily identifiable as university fiction than Disgrace. In Mpe’s short novel, there are no classroom scenes, no sustained interactions between students and teachers that structure the plot. Critical treatments of the novel, which coalesce around its postapartheid cosmopolitanism,Footnote ³⁹ its “revised inventory” of urban space,Footnote ⁴⁰ and its engagement with HIV/AIDS as an affective and ethical dimension of its humanist vision,Footnote ⁴¹ have not explored the extent to which the university is everywhere in this text, serving as the integral institution with which most of the main characters interact during their (mostly short) adult lives. Like Disgrace, Hillbrow establishes the inextricability of the institution of the university from the fast-changing relationship between the state and global capital. But by privileging students’ experiences, Mpe pushes past the white professorial cynicism and melancholia that dominate Coetzee’s presentation of the postapartheid university. Hillbrow instead explores what decolonial knowledge productionFootnote ⁴² might look like in the hands of an emergent student precariat—peers of Melanie Isaacs whose primary function in the novel is not to expose the ethical limits of a faculty member’s imagination, but whose own ethical imaginations take center stage and invite more extensive reflection on conditions of study and cultural nourishment in the New South Africa.

The Johannesburg of Welcome to Our Hillbrow is teeming with students, nearly all of whom have arrived from elsewhere to pursue their academic ambitions, which in turn are tightly bound up with the anti-apartheid struggle’s conception of education as the centerpiece of decolonization. Whereas for David Lurie, the postapartheid moment threatens to undermine higher education and humanistic inquiry as he knows it, Mpe’s student protagonists, Refentse and Refilwe, see themselves as poised to take advantage of the long-sought opening of the doors of learning and culture promised in the 1955 Freedom Charter, which declares that “the aim of education shall be to teach the youth to love their people and their culture, to honour human brotherhood, liberty and peace” and that all will enjoy unfettered access to the institutions designed to help fulfill this mission.Footnote ⁴³ A Fanonian conception of decolonization as “the creation of new men”Footnote ⁴⁴ informs the energy and earnestness of Mpe’s student protagonists, whose academic aspirations are notably non-instrumental: Refentse and Refilwe study language and literature and dream of a literary marketplace in which African-language writers can thrive. The loss of intellectual purpose and passion among students that David laments in Disgrace has no correlate in this story, where scholastic ambitions and ambitions of postapartheid liberated personhood are inextricable from each other.

This inextricability manifests spatially in the novel’s opening chapter, which chronicles Refentse’s peripatetic encounters with the city of Johannesburg, where he has moved from his home village of Tiragalong to study at the University of Witwatersrand. In Disgrace the university signals David’s separation, or at least his imagined and desired separation, from the flow of life in postapartheid South Africa; it is removed both geographically and spiritually from places like Salem and George, the exurban/rural settings in which the novel invites more extensive reflection on a postapartheid future, and he experiences the intrusion of the outside world—in the form of market forces and benevolent bureaucratic disciplinarity—into the academic sphere as a threat and an aberration. In Mpe’s novel, in contrast, Johannesburg’s geography could easily be construed as another protagonist; on its streets Mpe stages scenes of recognition and encounter that point to what Sarah Nuttall calls a “Levinasian ethics of entanglement,”Footnote ⁴⁵ the occasion for mutual vulnerability and precarity to manifest and reconfigure the meaning of community. Although Mpe’s narrative mapping of the Johannesburg cityscape has enjoyed extensive scholarly attention, the centrality of the Wits campus to that mapping has not. Refentse’s admission to Wits is why he moves to Johannesburg, and although his affiliation with one of the country’s most prestigious historically white universities confers upon him a privileged status among Tiralongians, his identity as a student migrant makes him anything but exceptional in the city. Academic aspirations are in fact constitutive of Hillbrow’s identity, as Refentse observes in response to a xenophobic comment by his cousin about the neighborhood’s immigrant population, who are “lecturers and students of Wits, Rand Afrikaans University and Technikons around Jo’burg; professionals taking up posts that locals are hardly qualified to fill.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Rather than reading makwerekwere (immigrants) as a drain on the resources of the nation-state, Refentse figures them as part of a Hillbrowian transnational intelligentsia, poised to help realize what Achille Mbembe describes as a South Africa–based Afropolitan university capable of fostering “diasporic knowledge networks” that can nourish the continent rather than priming it for the extractive work of global markets.Footnote ⁴⁷ Students, and rapidly changing student demographics, were vital to the transformation of Johannesburg as well as other South African cities in the years leading up to and following the end of apartheid. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Wits transformed from a campus that served mainly white students who commuted to a majority Black student body whose housing needs drastically outpaced the university’s existing dorm capacity.Footnote ⁴⁸ In the course of her discussion of another (much more explicitly campus-oriented) postapartheid novel, Nuttall registers something of the university’s intimate entanglement in postapartheid city life when she observes that “being at Wits is a way of being in the city; being in the city is a way of being at Wits.”Footnote ⁴⁹

The same is true of Hillbrow. Navigating a complicated series of street directions, Refentse and his cousin walk toward Bramfontein, the neighborhood where Wits is located and putatively a neighborhood with an entirely different character from gritty Hillbrow—except that, his cousin admits, “I never really know where Bramfontein begins” and Hillbrow ends.Footnote ⁵⁰ Bramfontein still boasts plenty of “dirty children, occupying themselves by taking turns at glue”Footnote ⁵¹ and spontaneous soccer games that “menace the lovely lawn” of the Civic Center.”Footnote ⁵² Apartheid-era spatial hermeticism has collapsed, and that collapse extends at least initially to the boundary between the city and the university, which appears before Refentse’s eyes with little fanfare and in visual continuity with the surrounding urban landscape and culture:

Before Wits is a campus to Refentse it is an address, another geographical point on his experiential map—and one that he reads alongside the address of a beer company, which in Refentse’s mind is readily imaginable as its complement rather than antithesis to the work of the university. Refentse embraces the juxtapositions and inconsistencies of how disparate institutions, people, and social realities jostle against one another in Johannesburg and assimilates the university into that scene of pleasant disarray. But it matters that Wits is at the heart of the map of the city that emerges in the early pages of this opening chapter. To inhabit the overwhelming and enticing world of postapartheid Johannesburg is to do so as a student whose education begins on the streets that lead to this institution.

Once Refentse arrives on campus, that sense of spatial fluidity and freedom vanishes, giving way to a geography that signals the endurance of apartheid racial stratification even after the doors of learning and culture have officially opened to all. Although he and his cousin have been able to navigate both Hillbrow and Braamfontein by relying solely on street signs, on campus they are lost and need to enlist the help of a senior student to locate the Central Admissions Office. Mpe’s account of the campus’s physical appearance through Refentse’s eyes is devoid of platitudes about its aesthetic charms, noting instead its “dull grayness”Footnote ⁵⁴ and “wonder[ing] how any University with Architecture as one of its specialties, as you read in their information booklet, could allow such huge but ugly structures to be erected on its premises.”Footnote ⁵⁵ If Refentse finds campus architecture off-putting, he is also keenly aware of his own body, placed in this space, as potentially off-putting to others; he has showered beforehand in order “to be able to approach the officials of the big University without worrying that [his] presence might be somewhat offensive to their sense of smell.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Apartheid’s spatial boundaries may have collapsed, but neither official admission nor the ability to enter campus are enough to instill Refentse with a sense of belonging to the institution. If Wits is the city and the city is Wits, then Wits is the part of the city where Refentse becomes most keenly aware of his disruption to the historically white construction of studenthood and personhood. In one of the stories collected in Mpe’s posthumously published Brooding Clouds, which includes a prehistory and expansion of several of the characters who appear in Welcome to Our Hillbrow, Refentse identifies Wits as “the institution for higher alienation”;Footnote ⁵⁷ in Hillbrow that alienation manifests first and foremost through spatiality. Like Disgrace, Hillbrow contains scant explicit references to race, but the whiteness of the institutional space of Wits is made manifest in the labor Refentse must undertake to move about comfortably and confidently within it. The contrast to David Lurie’s own way of occupying classrooms, libraries, and gardens in Disgrace is stark.

Ultimately, navigating campus space is a far less daunting task for Refentse than managing the financial burden of higher education. Narrative time accelerates after his first day; his undergraduate career and master’s degree fly by in the space of a single paragraph, in which studenthood is revealed first and foremost as a financial identity.

In Brooding Clouds we learn that Refentse applied for an arts degree only after a poor performance on a math exam, as a result of “not knowing what else to do”;Footnote ⁵⁹ similarly his ascension to the ranks of faculty at Wits is narrated in notably unheroic and pragmatic terms as a solution to a financial problem that his undergraduate degree is responsible for creating. There is no way to sever the issue of the debt Refentse has acquired in the course of receiving his degree from the “good fortune” of being hired by that same institution immediately thereafter; as a writer, Refentse views academic employment as a day job, not a calling. His transition from student to lecturer is characterized less by triumph and more by temporary relief from loan-induced financial distress. Thus, to the extent that Refentse’s identity as a student is defined by the debt he accrues in order to achieve studenthood, that distinctly student identity persists long after he graduates, and even, it is strongly implied, until his death (it is not clear that those loans are ever paid off). This state of affairs is poorly understood by his Tiragalong acquaintances, for whom admission to Wits symbolizes a much less complicated ascendency to opportunity and privilege. Refentse’s fate is shaped in large part by this popular incomprehension of the true costs of higher education.

Debt—both in its manifestation as what he owes in student loans and in the psychic and social obligations his education confers upon him—is the constitutive feature of Refentse’s Bildung narrative, a narrative that is guided by what Jeffrey Williams identifies, in US contexts, as a pedagogy of debt. Resonating with Hillbrow’s presentation of Refentse as indentured from the moment he arrives on campus, Williams argues that “the new paradigm of funding sees the young not as a special group to be exempted or protected from the market, but as already fair game in the market, before they have developed skills and a purchase in the market.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Debt affectively disciplines (and punishes) students throughout their university careers and indeed serves as a kind of “continuing education” long after they have left campus; it “teaches a sensibility or feeling” of perpetual insecurity that becomes as endemic to students’ way of inhabiting the world as the tenets of humanistic study that are more explicitly and cheerfully embraced as part of the university’s mission.Footnote ⁶¹ If millennial university students really are the uninspired, instrumentalist learners David Lurie believes them to be, the pedagogy of debt suggests how they might have come to be that way: the compact that made a liberal arts education (with the humanities at its center) possible and desirable in an earlier age was the promise of a university degree’s ability to confer a certain class status upon its recipients—to perpetuate the privilege of the already privileged and to extend some of that privilege to a small, meritorious minority from the general population. In an era of concurrent skyrocketing enrollments and tuition, that compact has lost its purchase, and student identity is now temporally elongated by the financial arrangements that bind subjects to the university for decades after graduation. In the postapartheid world inhabited by Mpe’s protagonists, the pedagogy of debt is a sobering counterpoint to the liberatory aspirations attached to higher education in the popular imagination.

The pressures Refentse faces, particularly from family back in Tiragalong, have much to do with the fact that he attends one of South Africa’s most elite universities. But Refentse is only one of several students in the novel, and by setting him alongside other characters, mostly female, who study at other kinds of institutions, Mpe draws attention to the variety and unevenness in prestige and resources in the world of South African higher education. The “scarecrow woman,” the protagonist of Refentse’s unpublished short story whose plot is recounted in the text, attends the University of South Africa (Unisa), a correspondence university, and works her way through school on her earnings from kitchen jobs in white neighborhoods. Refentse’s ex-girlfriend Refilwe earns her degree at the University of the North, an apartheid-era historically Black (and therefore, especially after the end of apartheid, distressingly underresourced) institution in Limpopo. When she makes plans to pursue a graduate degree abroad, she must put those plans on hold in order to care for her sick mother and support her siblings’ secondary education.

It is through Refilwe that the novel’s comment on the university takes on transnational dimensions when she does finally travel to the United Kingdom for a master’s in publishing at Oxford Brooks University (the same degree program Mpe himself completed). The portion of the story that takes place in England aggressively repeats now familiar themes and turns of phrase, and Refilwe’s journey replays many of Refentse’s early experiences at Wits upon arrival. When she and a friend head “straight to the administration block [to] get all the formalities of enrolment over and done with,”Footnote ⁶² she learns that as a South African she will not need to register with the police, which sets her apart from many of her African classmates who face increased scrutiny and surveillance both on campus and upon arrival in England; like Refentse, she learns early that campus space may be physically navigable, but is nevertheless structured around exclusion. Also echoing Refentse’s experience, the coexistence of the university and the pub is constitutive to how she “maps” her new environment: “It was important, one might have said, to have knowledge and relaxation so close to each other, since hunger for knowledge and thirst for relaxation were twin desires, one complementing the other.”Footnote ⁶³ Campus and city spaces, and the modes of knowledge production/circulation they represent, blend seamlessly together in England just as they did in Johannesburg. Once again, the structural exclusions of university life are paired with a narrative gentleness, an endorsement of the enterprise of pleasurable learning and connection that can occur in campus’s liminal spaces. Finally, Oxford Brooks is intensely cosmopolitan; Refilwe’s dormitory is populated entirely by international students, “a United Nations of sorts”Footnote ⁶⁴ who quickly bond over their shared sense of English strangeness. Here is evidence of what Tsitsi Jaji identifies as this novel’s investment in a pan-Africanism that de-exceptionalizes the South African experience and her contention that “writing—and reading—in transition … should assume a plurality of frontiers, a plurality of states that need to be traversed and transitioned.”Footnote ⁶⁵ All universities depicted in Welcome to Our Hillbrow, as well as the dreams of learning and creative knowledge production that draw students to these institutions, not only facilitate but necessitate cosmopolitan encounters and the ethical challenges that accompany them. Studenthood and knowledge production are phenomena that radiate outward from the specificity of the titular Johannesburg neighborhood to larger and larger communities; South African and British universities, and all the messiness of the encounters and experiences that they facilitate, are part of a global dynamic of study.

Refentse and Refilwe’s cosmopolitan studenthood is consistently negotiated alongside their financial and corporeal precarity. Yet neither of them espouses the pragmatic, consumerist approach to higher education that the neoliberal university is supposed to have cultivated among its student population. The Hillbrow student characters’ interests are uniformly literary, and all are stymied by a publishing world governed by a political conservatism that manifests as linguistic conservatism. Early on in his short writing career, Refentse poses a seemingly unanswerable question: “How does it happen that Hillbrow is so popular, but writers ignore it?”Footnote ⁶⁶ This question is closely intertwined with other questions about language politics: What does it mean that the writers who might be best positioned to bring Hillbrow to life in their work are not able to publish in African tongues? This problem arises as well for the scarecrow woman, whose “big mistake” is writing her own novel in Sepedi and, in that language, “calling shit and genitalia by their correct names”; doing so quickly brands her as “vulgar” in the eyes of a class of reviewers “who had for a long time been reviewing works of fiction for educational publishers, and who were determined to ensure that such works did not offend the systems that they served.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Unlike Refentse (and Mpe), the scarecrow woman writes first in Sepedi; though “she knew English well enough to write in English,”Footnote ⁶⁸ her failure or refusal to deploy that language, the choice that positions her to write both for and about Hillbrowians and Tiragalongians, is what sinks her career. This is the point at which the text breaks into one of its only expositions on the history of apartheid and its legacies, citing the apartheid system’s equation of “euphemism” and “good morals”Footnote ⁶⁹ with postapartheid publishers’ inability to read honesty and exaction in African-language prose as anything other than vulgarity, their commitment to the apartheid-era belief “that life’s realities lay exclusively in euphemisms.”Footnote ⁷⁰ It is the scarecrow woman’s experience that occasions one of Mpe’s most explicit and damning comments on the conditions under which African writers create and publish in the late 1990s:

Language politics and education have a history of entanglement in South Africa, as the Bantu education laws that took effect from the 1950s onward exerted tight control over the languages in which African students could learn, and these issues were at the center of the country’s most famous twentieth-century student protests. At two decades’ distance from the Soweto uprising, Mpe’s characters face a different but crucially related set of linguistic struggles: they crave intellectual honesty, literary languages that are not beholden to a conservative publishing market driven by the needs of an education system that is decidedly not yet decolonized. It is crucial that educational textbook markets are the context in which this perpetuation of apartheid-era aesthetics and morals is enacted. Students are the readers who matter for the kind of humanistic work that universities could—and should—make possible (in contrast to Disgrace, in which David Lurie’s imagined reader for his Byron-biography-turned-opera is perhaps anyone but the quiet communications students who sit in his classroom). More to the point, as Mpe exposits in Hillbrow and elsewhere,Footnote ⁷² universities and schools shape the horizon of possibility for South African aesthetic production. Universities and their constitutive role in a national future pervade so much of Mpe’s text, and it is the studentness of Mpe’s protagonists that makes them both vulnerable but also full of radical potential, on the cusp of letting go of the toxicity of apartheid-era social violence and forging community and nurturing creativity.

It is thus Refilwe, who took her undergraduate degree in both English and SepediFootnote ⁷³ and plans a career in publishing, who comes closest to finding the means of realizing this imagined literary landscape into reality. Her master’s degree is meant to equip her to make space for writing attuned to “the language and events of everyday life”Footnote ⁷⁴ and a new generation of writers “who, while they appreciated the value of linguistic euphemism, also had their bright eyes open to its moral and philosophical dangers.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Her study abroad at Oxford Brooks is not a unidirectional escape from the limited options available to her in South Africa but instead an opportunity to better equip herself to build a better literary future at home, and it reinforces a firm compatibility between care for the local and cosmopolitan engagement—a Césairean “universal enriched by all that is particular” fashioned for the South African twenty-first century.Footnote ⁷⁶

Through his earnest and humanistically oriented student protagonists, Mpe steers clear of the bleak and stagnant portrayal of postapartheid studenthood to which Disgrace gives more credence. And yet Welcome to Our Hillbrow shares with Coetzee’s novel an uneasy not-quite-silence on the subject of student activism. Refentse and Refilwe suffer the ill effects of a higher education system that is far less “postapartheid” than it claims to be, but at no point does their abjection morph into a drive to take direct action against that system. In fact, the one character in the novel who does attempt a campus-based protest is Terror, a secondary school classmate of Refentse’s whose name is true to his character. Terror’s grudge against Refentse dates back to Refentse’s refusal to support his cynical effort to start a student strike at school as retaliation for being punished for his own bad behavior; their classmates sided with Refentse “because [they] respected you and because you presented an eloquent case in which you demonstrated that Terror’s intentions were for his benefit alone and nobody else’s.” Terror “had never forgotten that insult”Footnote ⁷⁷ and grows up to become a serial rapist who exacts revenge on Refentse by spreading rumors about his girlfriend back in Tiragalong, which leads to her and then Refentse’s suicides.Footnote ⁷⁸ Thus the only student in the novel who contemplates protest as a viable option is entirely morally bankrupt.Footnote ⁷⁹ As in Disgrace, in Hillbrow student protest is not accorded any significant ethical merit and appears mainly as a menacing force that is unlikely to effect positive change of any sort.

We might well read this aversion to acts of resistance in Hillbrow as a symptom of what Melissa Tandiwe Myambo describes as the novel’s inability to think past a liberal cosmopolitanism at a time when that cosmopolitanism was busy bankrupting dreams of radical liberation, a privileging of the rainbow nation’s politics of “belonging” that comes at the expense of a politics that might have dealt with the problem of “belongings,” with the need for a redistribution of material wealth. University spaces in Hillbrow conform to Myambo’s observation that “Mpe’s radical multiculturalism becomes possible only through an abstraction of place: for Mpe, ‘belonging’ is metaphorical and does not translate into the concreate ownership of material space.”Footnote ⁸⁰ We might also attribute the novel’s antipathy toward protest as a symptom of its historical moment, an investment in Njabulo Ndebele’s “rediscovery of the ordinary” and departure from the aesthetics of spectacle that dominated in the apartheid era.Footnote ⁸¹

And yet Mpe’s illumination of a wide variety of student vulnerabilities—the persistence of race as a prescription for how one occupies campus, debt, stifled creative and intellectual work, and, of course, HIV/AIDS—has much in common with the kind of intervention Rob Nixon identifies in postcolonial writers’ narrativization of environmental disaster as “slow violence.”Footnote ⁸² Revealing the plight of a student precariat in a postapartheid, neoliberal present requires sidelining the spectacular in favor of the temporally protracted, quiet struggles in which the personal and the political are deeply and subtly entangled. No one grows old in this novel: Refentse and Lerato commit suicide, Bohlale is hit by a car, and Refilwe succumbs to HIV/AIDS. As Emily Davis argues in her reading of Hillbrow as a contagion narrative, “The narrator’s cosmopolitan narrative invokes an interconnectedness for which there is no cure. No god intervenes to restore a parochial moral order; moreover, we are all guilty (or potentially guilty) of the same crimes and linked by our shared bodily passions and our shared vulnerability to suffering.”Footnote ⁸³ In Hillbrow student debt is the other condition through which this shared vulnerability comes into view, another source of “interconnectedness for which there is no cure.” And it is a condition that has its own temporality. As Williams observes, a pedagogy of student debt is predicated on the collective assumption that students have long lives ahead of them, futures structured around repayment schemes and perhaps an eventual liberation therefrom. But debt traps students in their studentness long after their university careers have ended. This long-term entrapment contrasts starkly with the compact temporality of student generations; faculty and administrators occupy campus for decades, whereas students do so for just a few short years. For Refentse, who dies in debt, student precarity is a terminal condition—or perhaps, especially given the fluidity in Hillbrow between life and the afterlife, it is more accurate to describe it as interminable, a condition that refuses to satisfy the demands of creditors by coming to an end. As Stefano Harney and Fred Moten argue, “unconsolidated debt” signals a rebuke to and an evasion of the privatizing project of credit and its “reign of terror, a hail of obligations to be met, measured, meted, endured.”Footnote ⁸⁴ In Hillbrow, studenthood is a permanent way of being in the world, one whose vulnerabilities and precarities are coupled with a willingness to pursue entirely nonpragmatic forms of knowledge production as well as forms of community. If the transition to democracy created the crisis of the student precariat, in Mpe’s hands that crisis also presents opportunities.