ESH379 - Writing South Africa: Race, Nation and Text - 2024/25

This module introduces students to a range of writing and contemporary cultural production from late- and post-apartheid South Africa. South African writers and artists have produced some extraordinary writing and other cultural production - engaged, politically charged, experimental - over the past three decades. This has been in response first to oppressive conditions in the late-apartheid state, then to the excitement of the dawn of a New South Africa in 1994, to the trauma of the process of truth-telling and reconciliation that followed, and to the multiple difficulties faced by the developing state. Students will engage with this material's historical and political circumstances, and consider such issues as: the aesthetics of protest; narrative responsibility and the ethics of representing trauma; writing the post-apartheid city; gender and home in the new nation. Authors studied include J.M. Coetzee, Njabulo Ndebele, Kopano Matlwa, Nadine Gordimer, Ivan Vladislavic and Zoë Wicomb.