Writing under pressure: A post‐apartheid canon?

Poyner, Jane

doi:10.1080/17449850802000472

Cited by 11 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 12 publications

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“…The provisional characterizations of the transitional period, though, emphasize its investment in “national, often nation‐building, processes which found their symbolic and moral centre in the hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission” (Samuelson 113). Along similar lines, Jane Poyner presents the transition from apartheid to post‐apartheid as a turn inward toward the confessional, claiming that “post‐apartheid, novelists and writers have been enabled to turn their gaze inwards to the private sphere, to reflection and self‐questioning, accounting for the proliferation of autobiographies and confessionals during this period” (103). Sindiwe Magona likewise associates the boom in autobiographical writing with the TRC, claiming that the public spectacle of personal storytelling by victims and perpetrators broadcasted on television and aired on radio throughout the country has inspired South Africans to view their individual stories as valuable contributions to the historical archive.…”

Section: Fiction In the Transitional Period: Confessional Narrativesmentioning

confidence: 99%

New Directions in Post‐Apartheid South African Fiction and Scholarship

Davis

2013

Literature Compass

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After the formal end of the apartheid period in 1994, some writers and critics expressed a sense of unease about the future of South African literature. Yet, the post-apartheid period has produced an array of texts on topics not previously part of South African literary discourse. Writing from the transitional period for the most part turned inward, working in or against the confessional mode modeled by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. During the current post-transitional period, marked loosely by the publication of J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace in 1999, a younger generation of writers has begun to represent new social issues surrounding difference and inequality, especially representations of Black women, gays and lesbians, and migrants. Recent critical approaches to this literature have offered valuable conceptual tools for further research.The dismantling of apartheid in the early 1990s, toward which so many South African writers had devoted their literary and political lives, marked a new era in creative production. 1 Some writers who had established themselves as vocal opponents of the apartheid regime, especially White writers like André Brink and Nadine Gordimer, seemed unsure of their role in the new dispensation. Brink has already become famous for claiming in the transitional period of 1993 that South African literature had lost its real purpose with the fall of apartheid: "Those were the days, terrible as they may have been," he remarked nostalgically, arguing that "a widespread gloom" had seized writers worried that "there is nothing to write about anymore" (qtd. in Frenkel and MacKenzie 1). But what choices are available to writers now that the constraints of apartheid have been lifted, or to reverse Brink's formulation, now that there is everything to write about?The politically oriented fiction of an earlier age has given way to a proliferating array of topics and writers since 1994. The transition from apartheid regime to post-apartheid democracy has also posed challenges for literary and cultural critics who study the region, many of whom argue that the new topics, identities, and tropes brought to life in contemporary South African fiction demand new interpretive categories and modes of reading. This essay sets out to provide a brief overview of some of these new directions in South African literary production and the scholarship about it.Post-apartheid literary production must grapple in one way or another with the highly politicized context of the apartheid period, in which the appropriate style and content of fictional works was the source of heated, and very public, debate. During the apartheid period, as Louise Bethlehem notes, many South African writers cleaved to the tradition of "politicized literature" (224) that dominated anti-and post-colonial literature on the continent at large, advocating what Oswald Mtshali called "the language of urgency" over "unnecessary and cumbersome ornaments like rhyme, iambic pentameter, abstract figures of speech, and an ornate and lofty style" (qtd. i...

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Section: Fiction In the Transitional Period: Confessional Narrativesmentioning

confidence: 99%

New Directions in Post‐Apartheid South African Fiction and Scholarship

Davis

2013

Literature Compass

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Introduction: The South African TRC and Its Narrative Legacies

Mussi¹

2020

Literary Legacies of the South African TRC

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Campus Fiction and Critical University Studies from Below: Disgrace, Welcome to Our Hillbrow, and the Postcolonial University at the Millennium

Gulick

2022

Postcolon. Lit. inq

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Two of South African literature’s best-known titles from the turn of the twenty-first century are works of campus fiction that rarely get recognized as such. In this article I read J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999) and Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow (2001) as novels whose figuration of the university is far more central to their treatment of the contradictions and ambiguities that characterize postapartheid South Africa than is generally acknowledged. In the course of narratives that seem largely focused on other things, these texts offer up a distinctly South African but also distinctly postcolonial variety of campus fiction, and a critical engagement with the neoliberal university and the conditions under which upward mobility and intellectual inquiry take shape in the twenty-first-century global south. Coetzee and Mpe suggest capacious and transformative, if also deeply ambivalent, ways of imagining an as-yet unrealized decolonial future for universities.

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Writing under pressure: A post‐apartheid canon?

Cited by 11 publications

References 12 publications

New Directions in Post‐Apartheid South African Fiction and Scholarship

New Directions in Post‐Apartheid South African Fiction and Scholarship

Introduction: The South African TRC and Its Narrative Legacies

Campus Fiction and Critical University Studies from Below: Disgrace, Welcome to Our Hillbrow, and the Postcolonial University at the Millennium

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