Apartheid And Beyond - South African Writers And the Politics of Place

Zusatztext The breadth and subtleties of Barnard's analysis make Apartheid and Beyond an important study of major South African literary figures Klappentext Apartheid may have met its political end five years ago and its symptoms may be in rapid remission, but there is no question that forty-two years of institutionalized social division have left deep and presumably indelible scars on the nation's cultural sensibility as well as its social past.Rita Barnard's new book considers the political use of space (for apartheid, Afrikaans for "separateness," is nothing if not fraught with the implications of "keeping one's place"), as expressed in literature of the apartheid era. Her work joins the efforts of a pantheon of cultural theorists fromFoucault to Homi Bhabha to Edward Said in scrutinizing the intimate workings of social space, power, writing, and resistance. From the racially segregated townships to the commuter trains loaded with political, economic, and human freight, Barnard shows how everyday facets of life in South Africatake on racial overtones of overpowering dimensions, and how fiction acts at once as a conspirator and a corrective. Drawing evidence from the works of South Africa's most celebrated contemporary writers--J.M. Coetzee, Athol Fugard, Nadine Gordimer, and others--Barnard sets up a powerful theory thatstresses the centrality of physical place to literary, political, and imaginative dominions. Zusammenfassung Apartheid and Beyond is a major contribution to the study of South African literature, offering innovative readings of writers like Coetzee, Gordimer, Fugard, Tlali, and Mda. Focusing on the relationship between place, subjectivity, and literary form, this study enhances our understanding of apartheid as a geographical form of control and of its imagined and actual transformation.

Product details

• Authors: Barnard, Rita Barnard, Barnard Rita
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 16.11.2006
• EAN: 9780195112863
• ISBN: 978-0-19-511286-3
• No. of pages: 221
• Dimensions: 160 mm x 241 mm x 16 mm
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > English linguistics / literary studies; Afrika, Vereinigtes Königreich, Großbritannien, POLITICAL SCIENCE / Political Freedom, LITERARY CRITICISM / Semiotics & Theory, HISTORY / Africa / General, LITERARY CRITICISM / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, LITERARY CRITICISM / African, Literature - Classics / Criticism, African History, Literary theory, Political control and freedoms, Political Control & Freedoms