Tra habitat e habitus. Classi borghesi e cultura materiale in Africa meridionale

Considering the recent theoretical developments in the fields of historiographical and literary research, as respectively promoted by Global History, Postcolonial Studies and World Literature, this paper deals with the formation processes of middle class on a global level, from both a socio-historical and cultural perspective. Starting from the criticism of the Eurocentric model, according to which non-European middle classes are to be merely accounted for as imitations of European middle classes, recent investigations have shown that the longstanding debate between a singular and a plural modernity can be nuanced by the understanding of related socio-historical and cultural phenomena as deeply entangled. Analysing the rise of Southern African middle classes as a specific case study, the aim of this paper is to emphasize the plural and entangled histories of black middle classes within two national contexts. The analysis of the dichotomy between the white rural middle class (as especially recognizable in the history of South African Boers) and the black urban lumpenproletariat as structuring the political and cultural history both of South Africa and Zimbabwe, in fact, is eventually challenged by the rise of black middle classes in the postcolonial and post-apartheid era. As these processes are rooted in a peculiar habitat such as the farm and exerted through a specific and yet all-encompassing habitus, this paper will retrace these aspects in the history of Southern African literature in English, focusing on recent novels such as John Maxwell Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999) and Peter Godwin’s When A Crocodile Eats The Sun (2006).