Description
(Text)
Endorsers of the "rainbow nation often use pain and pleasure to contrast the painful apartheid past with the pleasurable aspects of the present. This study examines the complex ways in which contemporary South African novels challenge this dichotomy and highlight the interdependencies, overlaps, and crossings between pain and pleasure. In doing so, the book argues, literary texts emphasise the continuities and connections between apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa. As the first extensive study on emotions and their literary representation in a South African context, this book provides a fresh perspective on the intricacies and contradictions of post-apartheid South African culture and on the multiple ways in which human beings relate to each other and in which communities are built. The complex theoretical framework on bodies, emotions, and their representation is outlined and applied to a broad variety of South African novels. The study takes up current issues in research on South Africa, such as the increasing focus on gender and sexuality, and addresses the need to develop a new epistemology for understanding contemporary South Africa.
(Table of content)
Table of Contents
Introduction1
1. The Body, Subjectivity, and Emotions13
1.1 Introduction13
1.2 Theories on the Body: Between Construction and Materiality14
1.3 The Body and Subjectivity19
1.4 Othering Bodies: Ethnicity, Gender, Sexuality21
1.5 The Body and Emotions: Pain and Pleasure25
1.6 Representing Bodies, Pain, and Pleasure35
2. "Perpetual Spirals of Power and Pleasure": The Body and Social Control in (Post-)Apartheid South Africa39
2.1 Introduction39
2.2 Discipline and its Discontents: Military Service and Masculinity45
2.3 (Post-)Apartheid Prisons and Police: Detention and State Violence64
2.4 Sex, Drugs, and Mind Control? Mental Illness and Hospitalisation78
3. Torture, Rape, Communication: The Traumatised Body in Post-Apartheid South Africa91
3.1 Introduction91
3.2 Narrating Pain - Overcoming Trauma? Narrative and Redemption98
3.3 A Female Experience? Narratives of Gendered and Sexual Violence118
3.4 Insidious Traumas - Re-locations of Grief and Pain138
4. Looking to the Future: Sexuality, Consumer Culture, and HIV/AIDS153
4.1 Introduction153
4.2 Liberated Bodies? The Healing Powers of Pleasure159
4.3 Pleasures of City Life: Bodies and Consumption169
4.4 The Pains of Pleasure: Representations of HIV/AIDS180
Conclusion193
Bibliography199
