زکریا بزدوده

This paper attempts to address liminality in André Brink’s An Act of Terror. The present author is interested in finding out the way Brink represents the status of various ethnicities during the political years of transition, from apartheid to post-apartheid era. Accordingly, the present author seeks to investigate Brink's techniques in representing liminality and the way he demonstrates each of the ethnicities in liminal spaces. This study throws a new light upon the way ethnicities used to be examined throughout history. The already accomplished researches have been either concerned with racial injustices towards blacks or have offered an investigation of Afrikaners' identity crisis in the post-apartheid era. On the contrary, the present study assumes different ethnicities as a unity. They become the other of National Party rather than other ethnicities. Victor Turner's concept of liminality forms the theoretical background throughout the analysis. Given these facts, the paper comes up with the conclusion that in this transitory period, minorities have an anxiety about their unknown future; they are intensively pessimistic to expect better possibilities for their future. They are fixed and have used to being in the limbo being imposed by apartheid. This novel is in fact a memoir of the liminal characters on an oscillatory endless journey.