Apartheid and beyond : South African writers and the politics of place /

Review by Choice Review

Barnard (Univ. of Pennsylvania) offers a broad-ranging examination of space in the work of J. M. Coetzee, Athol Fugard, Nadine Gordimer, Zakes Mde, Miriam Tlali, and Sindiwe Magona, looking at it as a symbol of apartheid's rigid political order of separate identities and places. Witness the forced removals of Black South Africans to homelands that had the effect of disenfranchisement; likewise, the classification of the population into ethnic groups and the assignment of residential territories in accordance with ethnic designation that facilitated surveillance and suppression. Accordingly, space becomes, in Coetzee's work, a barricade that obscures from public view individuals and the inequities associated with them. Conversely, the street in Gordimer's literature becomes "a Utopian space of social interaction." The aloe, with its grotesque thorns, becomes in Fugard's A Lesson from Aloes a symbol of stifling confinement. The correlation between geographical schemes and psychic space renders the consumerist tendencies of those described by Tlali in Muriel at Metropolitan understandable, as they express the need of the Black South Africans to expand their "inner space." And last, Barnard analyzes space in works by Mda as lacking in fixity and betokening the dynamic possibilities of a transnational South African culture. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. T. L. Jackson St. Cloud State University

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.

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Review by Choice Review

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