Anglophone South African Literature after 2000 has, Michael Chapman, argues, both quantitatively and qualitatively departed from South Africa’s literary output in the preceding decade. This development has been tentatively labelled as the beginning of the ‘post-transitional’ phase within South African Literature by Ronit Frenkel and Craig MacKenzie. Conceiving of it as a temporal marker rather than an artistic movement, they describe the post-transitional writing as one ‘which is often unfettered to the past in the way that much apartheid writing was, but may still reconsider it in new ways. Equally it may ignore it all together’ (2010:2). While Frenkel and McKenzie identify an aesthetic/stylistic shift, Margaret Lenta observes that authors of this new wave have broadened the understanding of ‘South Africanness’ by not shying away from formerly tabooed topics, such as intercultural and same-sex relationships or the marginalisation of women.

We suggest a more panoptic view by adopting a 'world-literary' approach. We opt for a (more) ‘distant close reading’, where ‘distant’, as suggested by Franco Moretti, involves the engagement with, or reading of, a greater number of texts under the auspices of various thematic and formal aspects. In order to do so, we follow the Warwick Research Collective in its theorisation of World-Literature as ‘the Literature of the world-system – of the modern capitalist world-system’ (2015: 8).

迈克尔查普曼认为，2000 年后的英语南非文学在数量和质量上都与前十年的南非文学产出背道而驰。这一发展已被 Ronit Frenkel 和 Craig MacKenzie 暂时标记为南非文学“后过渡”阶段的开始。他们将其视为一种时间标记而不是一种艺术运动，他们将后过渡时期的写作描述为一种“通常不受过去的束缚，就像许多种族隔离写作一样，但仍可能以新的方式重新考虑它。同样，它可能会一起忽略它”（2010：2）。虽然 Frenkel 和 McKenzie 确定了审美/风格的转变，

我们建议采用“世界文学”的方法来更全面地看待问题。我们选择（更多）“远距离细读”，其中“远距离”，正如佛朗哥莫雷蒂所建议的那样，涉及在各种主题和形式方面的主持下参与或阅读更多的文本。为了做到这一点，我们遵循华威研究集体将世界文学理论化为“世界体系的文学——现代资本主义世界体系的文学”（2015：8）。