Description
Book SynopsisThe purpose of Narrating the New Nation is to engage with South African Indian writings through a critical examination of the oeuvre of key writers within a postcolonial theoretical framework. With the advent of democracy, South Africa has witnessed new writings which either reflected on apartheid with elements of restoration for past atrocities and centered around reflective nostalgia, or looked ahead with optimism and foregrounded new beginnings. The end of the interregnum in 1994 drove people to narrate the relationship between past, present and future, which revealed an exciting diversity and rituals of bourgeois lives or reflected upon disadvantaged and marginalized homes in townships, casbahs and ghettos. These innovative narratives attempt to conquer and spatialize different histories, while at the same time finding creative ways to assemble shattered fragments of memory. A critical question this study asks is whether South African literature continues to address theme
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments – Rajendra Chetty and Jaspal Kaur Singh – Introduction: Resilience in Diaspora Writings of the Indian Community in South Africa – Rajendra Chetty: Ethical versus Ethnic Pre-eminence: The Centrality of South African Indian Writing – Jaspal Kaur Singh: Excavating Cultural Memories: Social Justice and Social Change in Fatima Meer and Sita Gandhi’s Texts – Rajendra Chetty: Black Lives Matter: The Significance of Fatima Meer’s Prison Diary – Rajendra Chetty: Diaspora and Imperialism: An Analysis of Ronnie Govender’s The Lahnee’s Pleasure – Jaspal Kaur Singh: Apartheid and Postapartheid Literary Imagination in Ahmed Essop’s Fiction – Jaspal Kaur Singh: The Global North and South: Comparative Postcolonial Poetics in Diasporic South Asian Women’s Texts – Rajendra Chetty: Representing Durban in South African Indian Writing – Jaspal Kaur Singh: From the Individual to the Collective: Acts of Resistance and Social Transformation in Pregs Govender’s Love and Courage: A Story of Insubordination – Jaspal Kaur Singh: Queering South Asian Indian Diaspora: Theories and Intersectionalities.
