This book has offered a defence of difficulty, of failure and of misunderstanding. It has argued that the long ending of apartheid can only be brought about by a high degree of tolerance for difference and for disagreement. Accented thinking, as it has been theorised in these pages, brings difference to the surface, and does not strive for a unified and unitary position. Therefore the reasoning in this book has been about moments of conflict and non-agreement as possible sites of learning and transformation. With such an approach, instances of disagreement and misunderstanding become rich with potential instead of providing the instances of breakdown or failure that lead to silence. Disagreement, and the discussion and acknowledgment of disagreement, are held up in this book as a version of ideal classroom practice, where the lessons that are learned do not strive to create unity or agreement.

In the recently published The Cambridge History of South African Literature, the editors open the work with a section on racial classification, ‘Note on racial nomenclature and languages’ (Attridge and Attwell 2012: xvii): ‘The history of racial classification in South Africa makes it necessary to use terms referring to different racial groups; this is done without any implication that these categorisations have a scientific basis.’ This note is included partly for an international audience – South African texts intended for an international audience often carry such notes, describing to others what South Africans may disagree with, but always assume and know intuitively. In this case, the editors have also included these notes as a way of talking through the ways in which knowledge has been ordered in South Africa. The Cambridge History reflects on the way ‘we’ have been categorised, and also on how knowledge about ‘our’ traditions has been categorised in an unwitting re-enactment of the imposed classifications. The editors offer a multiauthored perspective, and allow traditions that have developed alongside one another to crash into one another, reading works in the new contexts provided by mapping adjacency. They take the view that the history of each of the country's literatures appears in a different light when viewed in the context of the others, even when there is no explicit influence or shared traditions.