Politics, Imagination and Everyday Life in Nadine Gordimer’s The Pickup

Abstract

The concept of mass dictatorship is a historical framework with which to analyse twentieth-century dictatorships from a transnational perspective; it challenges the developmental view of history by highlighting the fact that twentieth-century dictatorship regimes were part of a very modern project that found its roots in the nation-state, rather than a pre-modern political abnormality, and as such, they have been an inseparable part of the transnational formation of modernity. Furthermore, the concept of mass dictatorship aims at criticizing the antagonism of the past and present between, in most cases, national/cultural groupings around the world entrenched in the rigid dichotomy of ‘perpetrator vs. victim’. It also problematizes the simplistic understanding of power dynamics in the modern regime of the nation-state, and ultimately challenges the complacent stance towards the relationship between responsibility(-ies) and complicity(-ies). And there is more to it. This historical hypothesis tries to do something un-historical; it strongly urges us to ‘imagine’ in order to move beyond the closed dynamics between coercion (from above) and consent (from below). In other words, it puts a heavy emphasis on the role of imagination for us to think and act outside the ‘behemoth — a perfect tightly sutured political machine, which does not allow even a tiny space for dissent and resistance’.¹