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.

This anthology comprises of interviews with contemporary South African authors, offering vignettes of their lives and summaries of their works. In curating this book, Danyela Demir and Olivier Moreillon step beyond pure literary theory and analysis. They welcome the authors to speak and assess the literary panorama in which they live and co-create. However, Demir and Moreillon also trace concepts and terms that describe the current South African literature, such as post-transitional literature and literature beyond 2000. By adopting a world-literary approach to (post)apartheid literature, this book contributes to debates on contemporary South African writing. In addition, Tracing the (Post)Apartheid Novel Beyond 2000 seeks to raise awareness of the imbalance in both critical and public attention between literary ‘big names’, such as André P. Brink, J.M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer and Zakes Mda, who are popular worldwide, and the younger and newer generation of South African writers, who go largely unnoticed. Print edition not for sale in Sub Saharan Africa.

The story of an affluent white South African family during apartheid. Its narrator is the son of an Afrikaner general and he describes his growing disillusion with the cruelty and arrogance of the whites. Set in the 1970s, the novel follows him from boyhood to soldiering in Angola, fighting the blacks.

Nadine Gordimer and the Rhetoric of Otherness in Post-Apartheid South Africa observes and examines several issues that are central to the South African writer’s works: the uniqueness of terror in a difficult historical period, the desire to annihilate racial oppression, and, above all, the psychological alienation provoked by racism. The analysis also focuses on literary topics that are specific to Gordimer’s post-Apartheid writings, such as the significance of multiculturalism, the status of writers, the banalisation of violence due to mass-media coverage, the reconciliation with a violent past, globalization and loss of cultural and national identity, economic exile, and migration. The book proposes in five chapters a journey into Nadine Gordimer’s novels, short stories and non-fiction that presents the reader with a multifaceted Other who is no longer specific to postcolonial and multicultural South Africa but can be identified across the globe as alterity is redefined by globalization.

This study analyses the representation of Durbanite and Capetonian urban spaces in the following selection of post-apartheid works: Mariam Akabor's ''Flat 9'', Rozena Maart's ''Rosa's District Six'', Johan van Wyk's ''Man Bitch'', K. Sello Duiker's ''Thirteen Cents'', Bridget McNulty's ''Strange Nervous Laughter'', and Lauren Beukes' ''Moxyland''. The focus lies on the interrelatedness of shifting post-apartheid subjectivities and urban space (and place) in these literary works. The analysis not only grants access to different 'new voices` of post-apartheid literature, it also sheds light on the perception of South African history, urban geography, and cultural topography - essentially, on real as well as imagined South African urban spaces - as the literary representations of city-spaces become archives of cultural transformation processes; a gateway to the understanding of the developments and changes of, and within, the two cities in question.