State of peril : race and rape in South African literature /

Graham (Stellenbosch Univ., South Africa) provides a historicized reading of South African literature and racial politics through representations of rape. Beginning with early-contact narratives and ending with post-Apartheid narratives, the author tracks the development of the "black peril" trope through the South African imagination. He explores the trope as a function of the anxieties that licensed racial segregation and Apartheid, and ends by demonstrating that those anxieties continue to animate racial politics in South Africa today. Though giving particular attention to counterdiscursive and subversive representations, Graham moves through early settler writing, to foundational "black peril" novels, to Apartheid-era works revealing a preoccupation with miscegenation, to rescriptings of peril narratives (black and white) by black writers, and finally to post-Apartheid deployments of the trope by black and white South Africans. Attention to the history of production, censorship, dissemination, and reception greatly enhances the nuanced readings of this troubling trope. The readings of Olive Shreiner's Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland (1897), Daphne Rooke's Mittee (1952), Arthur Maimane's Victims (1976), and J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace (1999) are particularly good. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty. J. C. Eustace Acadia University