Abjecting the Racial Agency in Damon Galgut’s The Promise

Being a South African post-apartheid novel, The Promise (2021) by Damon Galgut is a narrative whose characters are caught up in a nation torn by racial divisions. The novel bids a sharp comment on racial supremacy ideologies and the dead-ends such dogmas engender. As a white writer who is cognizant of the appalling racial condition of his nation, Galgut brawls to find hope in post-apartheid South Africa which does not live up to the pledged heterogeneity between races. Thus, the fundamental premise of this essay adopts the notion of the abject in the novel which is employed, I argue, to depart from the Manichean politics of black-white divide into a “Third Space” that threatens the norms of fixity. In addition, the essay makes use of Homi Bhabha’s notions of enunciation and the stereotype. These concepts help in construing the novel as a site of erupting the prevailed racial patterns in South Africa.