Literary Journalism and Geographies of Identity: Generic Hybridity in Antjie Krog's works

Narrative, or literary, journalism has become a dominant trend in the South African literary landscape. This study situates Antjie Krog’s work within that landscape. First, it offers an overview of the debates about and around literary journalism in South Africa. It then addresses the obvious generic hybridity of Krog’s works (mostly A Change of Tongue and Begging to Be Black), before suggesting that the genre of the travel narrative might be a way of approaching her nonfiction corpus. In the end, rather than trying to pigeonhole her books within a single genre, the study relies on a metaphor, following Krog’s own method, to read her work: Looking at Krog’s works as journeys becomes a way of eschewing theoretical dead ends and offering a practical lens through which the very instability of her texts becomes a testimony to the unstable nature of identities, personal and literary, in post-apartheid South Africa.