Description
Book SynopsisPart literary history, part feminist historiography And Wrote My Story Anyway: Novels by Black South African Women critically examines influential novels in English by eminent black female writers.
Studying these writers' key engagements with nationalism, race and gender during apartheid and the transition to democracy, Barbara Boswell traces the ways in which black women's fiction critically interrogates narrow ideas of nationalism. She examines who is included and excluded, while producing alternative visions for a more just South African society.
This is an erudite analysis of ten well-known South African writers, spanning the apartheid and post-apartheid era: Miriam Tlali, Lauretta Ngcobo, Farida Karodia, Agnes Sam, Sindiwe Magona, Zoë Wicomb, Rayda Jacobs, Yvette Christiansë, Kagiso Lesego Molope and Zukiswa Wanner. Boswell argues that black women's fiction could and should be read as a subversive site of knowledge production in a setting, which, for centuries, denied black women's voices and intellects.
Reading their fiction as theory, for the first time these writers' works are placed in sustained conversation with each other, producing an arc of feminist criticism that speaks forcefully back to the abuse of a racist, white-dominated, patriarchal power.
Table of Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Author's Preface
- Acronyms
- Introduction ‘… And Wrote My Story Anyway': Black South African Women's Fiction and the Nation
- Chapter 1 Writing as Activism: A History of Black South African Women's Writing
- Chapter 2 Rewriting the Apartheid Nation: Miriam Tlali and Lauretta Ngcobo
- Chapter 3 Dissenting Daughters: Girlhood and Nation in the Fiction of Farida Karodia and Agnes Sam
- Chapter 4 Interrogating 'Truth' in the Post-Apartheid Nation: Zoë Wicomb and Sindiwe Magona
- Chapter 5 Making Personhood; Remaking History in Yvette Christiansë and Rayda Jacobs's Neo-Slave Narratives
- Chapter 6 Black Women Writing 'New' South African Masculinities: Kagiso Lesego Molopes and Zukiswa Wanner
- Conclusion Literature as Theory: Towards a Black South African Feminist Criticism
- Select References
- Index
