How do writers represent a whole society in a nation riven by racial segregation? “Impossible Realisms” pursues that question by closely reading realist genres—the travelogue, the short story, and the novel—from twentieth-century South Africa. These genres represent the primary aesthetic responses to state segregation and apartheid. They fulfill the realist aesthetic criteria historically associated with Georg Lukács: that is, they aspire to “totality,” defined as the demand to represent social relations in the round. As a research project, this dissertation tracks the running contest between South African writers’ aspirations to represent totality and the historical and aesthetic limitations imposed by segregation. The first chapter argues that South African realist writers aspired to represent totality along the lines of Jan Smuts’ “holism,” depicting and challenging Smuts’ segregated “wholes.” The second chapter reads Sol T. Plaatje’s Native Life in South Africa (1916) to illustrate how South African realism emerged through the remaking of the periphery of capitalist world system. The third chapter searches for organic genres of realism in the features, photography, and short stories of Drum magazine between 1951 and 1957. The final chapter on Nadine Gordimer’s A World of Strangers (1958) elucidates why the unknowability of Black subjectivity to a white writer prevents her novel from depicting totality. “Impossible Realisms” thus explains how the conditions of racial capitalism in South Africa precipitated certain realist narrative forms and illustrates why it was impossible for South African writers to represent society as a totality during the period in question. It also reveals the connections between literary realism, Black journalism, and forms of liberal subjecthood. The epilogue briefly assesses the parallel development of the Black consciousness movement, SPRO-CAS, and Ravan Press to suggest that new ideas and ways of representing totality emerged in the early 1970s. This dissertation concludes that realist depictions of society as a totality were impossible due to the historical arrangements of segregation, and that this blockage could not be overcome without an epistemic break made possible by an unusual admixture of political organizing, social research, and publishing.