Conclusion: How Close Is Too Close? Anger, Reconciliation and the “Born Free” Generation

Abstract

Libin concludes by focusing on a recent play by Mongiwekhaya, I See You, and in so doing argues for a post-post-apartheid culture in South Africa. Returning to Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism, Libin sums up the study as a whole by suggesting that affect represents the jarring impact of intimacy and its unpredictable and often shocking embodiments. Affect, he contends, is the eruption of autonomous identity when confronted with a trauma that threatens to subsume identity. The culminating analysis of I See You represents a post-post-apartheid South Africa, a society still aware of both the trauma of apartheid and the hope of genuine transformation, but exhausted at the thought of either.