Falling: Literature and Leaderless Movements

This essay examines three post-apartheid literary texts in relation to the student movements known as Fallism, which came into public awareness in South Africa in the years 2015–17. Firstly, I argue that two novels, Room 207 (2006) by Kgebetli Moele and Unimportance (2014) by Thando Mgqolozana, foreshadow the ways in which Fallism would become leaderless through internal critique of cisgender heterosexual masculinity. Using Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Assembly (2017), the essay places debates about gender and leaderless movements in an international frame, before making the argument that Fallism morphed in and out of being a leaderless movement under pressures of discourse on gender. I then examine a play, The Fall (2016), which is a chronicle of Fallism created by a collective of “former students,” to elaborate on debates about gender that resulted in Fallism becoming leaderless. In conclusion, the essay considers the significance of Fallism as a movement that broke with prior epistemologies while simultaneously building on struggles of the past.