New Directions in Post‐Apartheid South African Fiction and Scholarship

Abstract

After the formal end of the apartheid period in 1994, some writers and critics expressed a sense of unease about the future of South African literature. Yet, the post-apartheid period has produced an array of texts on topics not previously part of South African literary discourse. Writing from the transitional period for the most part turned inward, working in or against the confessional mode modeled by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. During the current post-transitional period, marked loosely by the publication of J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace in 1999, a younger generation of writers has begun to represent new social issues surrounding difference and inequality, especially representations of Black women, gays and lesbians, and migrants. Recent critical approaches to this literature have offered valuable conceptual tools for further research.The dismantling of apartheid in the early 1990s, toward which so many South African writers had devoted their literary and political lives, marked a new era in creative production. 1 Some writers who had established themselves as vocal opponents of the apartheid regime, especially White writers like André Brink and Nadine Gordimer, seemed unsure of their role in the new dispensation. Brink has already become famous for claiming in the transitional period of 1993 that South African literature had lost its real purpose with the fall of apartheid: "Those were the days, terrible as they may have been," he remarked nostalgically, arguing that "a widespread gloom" had seized writers worried that "there is nothing to write about anymore" (qtd. in Frenkel and MacKenzie 1). But what choices are available to writers now that the constraints of apartheid have been lifted, or to reverse Brink's formulation, now that there is everything to write about?The politically oriented fiction of an earlier age has given way to a proliferating array of topics and writers since 1994. The transition from apartheid regime to post-apartheid democracy has also posed challenges for literary and cultural critics who study the region, many of whom argue that the new topics, identities, and tropes brought to life in contemporary South African fiction demand new interpretive categories and modes of reading. This essay sets out to provide a brief overview of some of these new directions in South African literary production and the scholarship about it.Post-apartheid literary production must grapple in one way or another with the highly politicized context of the apartheid period, in which the appropriate style and content of fictional works was the source of heated, and very public, debate. During the apartheid period, as Louise Bethlehem notes, many South African writers cleaved to the tradition of "politicized literature" (224) that dominated anti-and post-colonial literature on the continent at large, advocating what Oswald Mtshali called "the language of urgency" over "unnecessary and cumbersome ornaments like rhyme, iambic pentameter, abstract figures of speech, and an ornate and lofty style" (qtd. i...

Post-Apartheid Fiction: A Reading of Yewande Omotoso’s The Woman Next Door

“…Furthermore, according to Frenkel and Mackenzie (2010) , the new fiction focuses on narratives of "buried histories, the legacies of resistance, suppressed conceptions of identity and the deployment of nuance to describe the ordinary" (p. 4). Similarly, Davis (2013) remarks that the TRC has changed "the ostensible focus from the national to the individual" as it "seemed to understand its mandate within the individualistic frame of personal forgiveness" (p. 799).…”