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“There is the Black Man’s Story and the White Man’s Story”: Narratives of Self and the Valence of “Stories” in Postapartheid Culture

Summary Taking into its purview the marked tendency in postapartheid culture to emphasise self-narrativisation, this article examines “self-voicing” in conceptual terms, citing and discussing scholars who have commented on similar trends. The article then considers a more specific case in which narratives of the self loom large, namely Jonny Steinberg’s non-fiction work, The Number. In this book, Steinberg not only interweaves several instances of self-storying, but he also shows that narrative relays – in which the self becomes an entity that is susceptible to shaping – are themselves caught up in the politics of everyday life, and of cultural contestation more generally, rendering them contingent. The article concludes with a brief consideration of Achille Mbembe’s 2015 Facebook intervention in which he warns, in the wake of the Rhodes Must Fall campaign, against the meta-text of an allconsuming preoccupation with the bogey of whiteness.