Generation and complicity in Zoe Wicomb's Playing in the Light

Zoe Wicomb's novel Playing in the Light (2006) continues to address a central concern in Wicomb's earlier fiction, that of conflict between generations where the racist complicity of an older generation is addressed from the point of view of their children. Generation is, in Wicomb's work, not simply a concern for individual families but deeply connected to and reflective of the political legacy of coloured identities. 'Playing white' gains its particular meaning within the question of complicity - the association of whiteness with superiority, and the very real privilege granted to persons classified as white under the Population Registration Act. In the aesthetic theory of the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer the concept of 'play' is used to address the function of the work of art. The opposition between play and seriousness is, according to Gadamer, a result of a one-sided focus on the player rather than the play itself as subject. The metaphorical use of play in the expression 'play-whites' also suggests that the game itself is what has primacy, not the players. By addressing the issue of 'playing white' through a depiction of conflicts between generations, Wicomb's novel approaches history in a manner that evokes Gadamer's concept of gleichzeitigkeit (contemporaneity) whereby history becomes present in its enactment through the work of art.