Trauma, Resistance, Reconstruction in Post-1994 South African Writing (Postcolonial Studies)

✍ Scribed by Jaspal K. Singh (editor), Rajendra Chetty (editor)

• Publisher: Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers
• Year: 2010
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 216
• Edition: First printing
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

The re-conceptualization of South Africa as a democracy in 1994 has influenced the production and reception of texts in this nation and around the globe. The literature emerging after 1994 provides a vision for reconciling the fragmented past produced by the brutality of apartheid policies and consequently shifting social relations from a traumatized past to a reconstructed future. The purpose of the essays in this anthology is to explore, within the literary imagination and cultural production of a post-apartheid nation and its people, how the trauma and violence of the past are reconciled through textual strategies. What role does memory play for the remembering subject working through the trauma of a violent past?

✦ Table of Contents

Table of Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
A. Memory and the Construction of Identities 9
Chapter 1 South Asian Diaspora in Africa: Collective and individual memory in Fatima Meer’s and Sita Gandhi’s texts - JASPAL KAUR SINGH 11
Chapter 2 Revisiting the past: Memory and Identity in Elleke Boehmer's Bloodlines and Zoë Wicomb's David's Story and Playing in the Light - FIONA MCCANN 27
B. Truth, Reconciliation, Resistance and Reconstruction 41
Chapter 3 Lyric Monsters: The Humanizing Process of Lyric Language in Antjie Krog’s Country of My Skull - OKLA ELLIOT 43
Chapter 4 Reconstruction and Resistance in the Poetry of Gcina Mhlophe - DENISE HANDLARSKI 57
Chapter 5 Transcending Apartheid: Empathy and the Search for Redemption - IMKE BRUST 77
C. Damaged Narratives, Silenced Voices and Race 101
Chapter 6 Mut(e)ilations: The Loss of Voice and the Voice of Loss: Memory, Reconstruction and Reconciliation in South African Literature - DEBORAH DONIG 103
Chapter 7 Secrets and Lies: Trauma, Resistance and Reconciliation Postponed in Zoë Wicomb’s David’s Story - JANE POYNER 121
Chapter 8 Driving the Devil into the Ground: Settler Myth in André Brink’s Devil’s Valley - JOHN HIGHFIELD 131
D. Trauma, confession and autobiographies 149
Chapter 9 Transmogrifying the Traumatic into the Democratic Ideal in Autobiographical Cultural Memory: Nelson Mandela’s The Long Walk to Freedom - MIKE KGOMOTSO MASEMOLA 151
Chapter 10 White Lies, White Truth: Confession and Childhood in White Women’s Narratives - GEORGINA HORRELL 169
Chapter 11 Reconciling Citizenship, AIDS, and Gayness in Post-Apartheid South Africa - JOHN C. HAWLEY 187
Notes on Contributors 203