IN South Africa in recent years, a strong trend in creative and scholarly writing has been one in which writers try to imagine how to step away from South Africa's divisive past, and how to create other, unified, pasts. These imaginings have at times included fantasies of descent that are harmful in their self-forgiveness (a common genre in white South African writing in particular), but have also included challenging examples such as Pumla Gqola's What Is Slavery to Me?, where she (not the genetic descendant of slaves) thinks through the symbolic and historic gains of asking ‘what is slavery to me’. Such examples of thinking backwards, choosing our ancestors and our teachers, can create paths that lead to the accentedness this book theorises. But this kind of thinking also risks, as I showed in the chapter on the obliterated original, placing itself at a scene of origin that re-enacts a scandal of erasure. In thinking about South African traditions, as this book wants to do, the challenge is not only to write the histories of the past, but also to imagine the pasts we might have had. Whereas diaspora theory suggests that the subject longs for a lost homeland in the past, the nostalgia of South Africans is instead, I want to suggest, for a land in the future. Or, put differently, it is a longing for a kind of understanding of tradition that will create a past that we can in future think of nostalgically.

It is this complicated longing for a different past and a different future that was the cause of the most extreme disagreement I have ever had with a group of students. This conflict arose while teaching Disgrace (in a course on South African films and texts that I was guest teaching at SOAS, the School of Oriental and African Studies), a text that has been the source of conflict elsewhere too. The disagreement had to do with expectations, and with what I perceived to be the mismatch between their and my expectations of classroom conduct. It was a disagreement in which, I now see, I was stuck because of my inability to imagine the classroom in London and the classroom in South Africa.