Post-Apartheid Fiction: A Reading of Yewande Omotoso’s The Woman Next Door

Abstract

Omotoso's novel, The Woman Next Door (2014), can be best approached within the post-apartheid discourse of colorblindness, non-racialism, reconciliation, and cultural diversity. The paper aims to show how Omotoso's novel depicts an important epoch in the history of contemporary South Africa, i.e., the post transitional phase, by adopting the basic principles of the "Rainbow Nation" government. An analysis of Omotoso's novel reveals that though it does not openly deal with racism in the way apartheid fiction does, it does not ignore it either. That Omotoso's novel presents a reconsideration of racism by depicting its effects on determining black / white relations is also among the aims of this paper. Besides, best approached within the discourse of postapartheid era, Omotoso's The Woman Next Door re-examines African cultural identity in the 21st century. The paper elucidates how the writer deploys memory as a significant means of identity construction. In addition, Omotoso deconstructs the stereotypical image of the black woman long depicted in South African fiction. Certain concepts such as Hall's "cultural identity", Nuttall's "entanglement", Kalua's "intermediality" and Chapman's "the humanism of reconstruction" will be used to analyze the transformation in Omotoso's main characters in The Woman Next Door.