In recent years, the work of Zakes Mda - novelist, painter, composer, theatre director and film-maker - has attracted worldwide critical attention. As a novelist he writes about social identity in the 'new' South Africa and it is the versions of this identity that Gail Fincham's title explores, examining the five novels Mda has written since South Africa's transition to democracy: Ways of dying (1995), The Heart of Redness (2000), The Madonna of Excelsior (2002), The Whale Caller (2005) and Cion (2007). His explorations of refigured identity are rooted in his strongly painterly imagination which teaches his readers how to see anew by creating changed spaces in memory and culture. His novels are hybrids equally composed of African responses to modernity deriving from an oral culture and European multi-generic responses to modernity. Through a combination of magic realism, African orature and intertextuality with a Western canon, Mda undermines the dualistic thinking characteristic of our Western heritage - whether between the past and the present, the human and the non-human, the living and the dead, the rural and the urban. He imbues his fictional characters with the power to orchestrate a reconfigured subjectivity that is simultaneously political, social and aesthetic.