Description
This book shows how South African writing can help us to understand change after apartheid. It aims to shift the attention of literary criticism away from a narrow set of highbrow South African authors and towards a wider range of texts, including popular fiction. The object of analysis, at its largest level, is the South African polity as it veered between the hopeful optimism of the 'Rainbow nation' under Nelson Mandela, the murderous muddling of Thabo Mbeki, and the 'captured state' under Jacob Zuma. Questions of a political, economic, and sociological cast are central, with changes in the workplace, land reform, indigenous knowledge, xenophobia, corruption, and crime providing specific points of focus. Writing, Politics and Change in South Africa after Apartheid shows how creative literature of the post-apartheid period has a unique and powerful capacity to illuminate these issues and to intervene in our understanding of them.
Table of Contents
1. 'Step up for your Hustle': Aspiration and Frustration in the New South Africa ; 2. Empowerment: Popular Romance and the New Black Middle Class ; 3. Writing Crime: Threat, Class, and the Rule of Law; 4. Indigenous Knowledge and the Narrative Art of Recuperation ; 5. Love in the Time of Land Reform; 6. Xenophobia and Xenophilia: Migrancy and the Politics of Contemporary Citizenship.
