Nadine Gordimer’s The Pickup dramatizes how the errant energies of the postcolonial as event exceed paradoxical discourses of national exceptionalism, while illustrating the weight of mounting failures of postapartheid social and economic transformations in a world of global capital. Through her masterful use of passive voice, her complex framing of characters as effects of discourses, racialization, material determinations, and time, Gordimer registers the “facts” of the event and forces of time irreducible to history. In doing so, Gordimer highlights expressions of the event insinuated into bodily action and collectivities, impersonal forces that might precipitate new political futures.

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This special issue considers literature that has recourse to the ambivalent agency of a "national" condition outside of its place of production. In particular, it explores American-themed South African literature, with a particular focus on changing cultural patterns within a context of transnational flows. This special issue highlights conduits between South Africa and the United States that circulate cultural and political influence across and through places, forms, categorizations, and texts. Each article examines how literature can open circuits between affective alignments, histories, infrastructures, economies and importantly, political imaginaries of lived spaces in different time periods. This issue does not argue for a theory of replication between South Africa and America but rather works to develop analytical tools to highlight the transnational connections that create layers of resonant meaning while at the same time circulating "untranslatable" sense between South Africa and the United States. Each of the texts under discussion in this issue offers a rich meditation on transnational histories of raciology, global popular cultural flows, the destabilization of the specificities of place, and the resonant aspirations of the ordinary. The writers under discussion include Richard Rive,