Abstract

Sisonke Msimang’s Always Another Country is an intimate account of the lifelong search for ‘home’ by its autobiographical narrator, the child of exiled South African parents. My essay argues that Msimang’s figuring of a complicated, nationally-organized external realm through the exilic subjectivity of its narrator provides an opportunity to read a series of spaces in the text as what Michel Foucault, in ‘Of Other Spaces’ (1986), calls ‘utopias’ and ‘heterotopias’. Simply put, South Africa exists as a non-real space – a utopia – for most of the memoir. It carries down telephone wires and from television screens into the mind of Sonke, where it is reproduced as an alternate, imagined version of itself. On the other hand, ‘real’ spaces – living rooms, principals’ offices, family homes – all develop characteristics of Foucauldian heterogeneity. They are sites within sites or, as Peter Johnson explains, microcosms of reverse social ordering. Rather than producing an overly theoretical rendering of a deeply personal text, my essay aims to show the benefits of Foucauldian approaches in conceptualizing and understanding the complicated ways in which exiled-subjects occupy space in our nationally-organized world.

摘要

Sisonke Msimang永远是另一个国家是对其自传式叙述者——流亡南非父母的孩子——终生寻找“家”的亲密描述。我的文章认为，米西芒通过叙述者的流放主体性对一个复杂的、由国家组织的外部领域进行了构想，这提供了一个机会来阅读文本中的一系列空间，正如米歇尔·福柯在“其他空间”（1986）中所说的那样“乌托邦”和“异托邦”。简而言之，对于回忆录的大部分内容，南非作为一个非真实的空间存在——一个乌托邦。它沿着电话线和电视屏幕进入 Sonke 的脑海，在那里它被复制为自己的另一个想象版本。另一方面，“真实”空间——起居室、校长办公室、家庭住宅——都具有福柯式的异质性特征。它们是站点内的站点，或者，正如彼得约翰逊解释的那样，逆社会秩序的缩影。我的文章并没有对深度个人文本进行过度理论化的渲染，而是旨在展示福柯方法在概念化和理解流亡主体在我们国家组织的世界中占据空间的复杂方式方面的好处。