In an engaging and dynamic collection of essays on South African writing, an international cast of contributors pay detailed attention to the shifting parameters of scholarly debates on apartheid and the apartheid era. Investigating a range of literary and critical perspectives on a period that shaped the literature of South Africa for much of the twentieth century, the contributors offer a rich survey. The volume focuses on internationally acclaimed writers (Nadine Gordimer and J.M. Coetzee) as well as those writers who are yet to receive sustained critical attention (Mtutuzeli Matshoba, Alex La Guma, Bessie Head, Ahmed Essop, Ronnie Govender). Apartheid Narratives will be welcomed by academics and students of South African writing as a stimulating collection which maps the literary terrain of apartheid.

In an engaging and dynamic collection of essays on South African writing, an international cast of contributors pay detailed attention to the shifting parameters of scholarly debates on apartheid and the apartheid era. Investigating a range of literary and critical perspectives on a period that shaped the literature of South Africa for much of the twentieth century, the contributors offer a rich survey. The volume focuses on internationally acclaimed writers (Nadine Gordimer and J.M. Coetzee) as well as those writers who are yet to receive sustained critical attention (Mtutuzeli Matshoba, Alex La Guma, Bessie Head, Ahmed Essop, Ronnie Govender). Apartheid Narratives will be welcomed by academics and students of South African writing as a stimulating collection which maps the literary terrain of apartheid.

Writing as Resistance charts the inner workings of apartheid, through the encounters-- imprisonment, exile, and homecoming-- that crucially defined its violent reign and ultimate overthrow. Author Paul Gready demonstrates the transformative nature of autobiographical narrative as resistance in the context of political struggle. This multidisciplinary study addresses a range of important contemporary topics: migration, postcolonialism, globalization, nationalism, human rights, and political democratization, among others. While informed by the work of South African writers-- including Breytenbach, Coetzee, First, Krog, Modisane, and Serote-- and adding to the literature on the apartheid era, this book speaks to all cultures of violence. With this important work Gready sheds new light on the relationship between violence and creativity.

Narratives of Nation Media, Memory & Representation in the Making of the New South Africa

This book examines South Africa’s post-apartheid culture through the lens of affect theory in order to argue that the socio-political project of the “new” South Africa, best exemplified in their Truth and Reconciliation Commission Hearings, was fundamentally an affective, emotional project. Through the TRC hearings, which publicly broadcast the testimonies of both victims and perpetrators of gross human rights violations, the African National Congress government of South Africa, represented by Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, endeavoured to generate powerful emotions of contrition and sympathy in order to build an empathetic bond between white and black citizens, a bond referred to frequently by Tutu in terms of the African philosophy of interconnection: ubuntu. This book explores the representations of affect, and the challenges of generating ubuntu, through close readings of a variety of cultural products: novels, poetry, memoir, drama, documentary film and audio anthology.

Unusable pasts; scandalous lives; political betrayal, confession and collaboration: reading narrative non-fiction across South Africa's unfinished transition.

Provides a new perspective on the struggle against apartheid, and contributes to key debates in South African history, gender inequality, sexual violence, and the legacies of the liberation struggle.