economic powers does not reduce their influence on the postcolonial states. This is why a
more aggressive effort must be made on the part of the postcolonial nation state or
victims of neo-liberalism to negotiate the terms of its existence. The situation is what Iain
Chambers (1994:110) describes as the “co-presence of globalisation and differentiation”
through which the limits of the nation-state are both supplemented and interrogated. But
even with this negotiation, where the autonomy of the nation-state is limited, as in the
illustration by Sole, the capital flight that results or the economic hardship that it
precipitates is bound to ingest a pull towards some kind of deterritorialization.
Considered against the backdrop of the South African nation state, therefore, the logic
that emerges is that institutional apartheid may have crumbled, and the exilic victims it
produced may have returned, nonetheless, the experience of dispersal remains yet a
challenge that the nation faces as a result of the contemporary world order.
The vulnerability of the postcolonial nation state to the manipulations of globalization
and deterritorialization that it produces must have accounted for the all-inclusive, almost
fabulous, approach that Serote has adopted in the collection. Perhaps, it is his own way of
extenuating the level of threat of irrelevance and un-connectivity that the postcolonial
nation state faces at the postmodern moment which celebrates migrancy with intensity
and perpetuity. In the process, the original connection of the subject is forgotten or erased
completely. Therefore, if personages of deterritorialization are ordinarily expected to be
the living in their physical forms, Serote extends this to the abstraction of death as well.
Doing this must be recognized as transcending the commonplace acknowledgement of
the dead and the ancestors as being spatially located in the metaphysical realm. Such
conventional demarcation between the dead and the living in the conception of time and
space falls in line with the philosophically inflected remark of Simon Critchley (1997:
87) that “being-towards-death permits the achievement of authentic selfhood, which...
repeats the traditional structure of autarchy or autonomy, allowing the self to assume its
fate and the community to assume its destiny”.
But more than that, Serote reconfigures the existence of the dead in the imagination of
the living by asserting that even in their incorporeality and transition to the metaphysical