This book explores the ways in which postapartheid literature reinvents South African mourning traditions. During the apartheid era, politics exerted a particular pressure on both funerary practices and on literature, both of which were instrumentalised as weapons in the struggle: just as funerals were turned into mass political protests, literature was pressed into service as protest literature. In the postapartheid era, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (1996-99) continued to press mourning into political service, particularly through the Human Rights Violations hearings in which private losses were mourned in public and immediately subsumed within a national narrative of forgiveness and reconciliation. Despite calls for the recovery of artistic freedom and literary autonomy, literature has also been subject to political pressure; writers have been expected to follow the TRC’s lead and produce a literature of national reconciliation. While a literature of reconciliation might appear to allow for more imaginative possibilities than protest literature, it is still driven by a particular politics of memory. Durrant explores the ways in which postapartheid literature has acceded to and/or resisted this politics of memory and asks what literary resistance might mean in a postapartheid context. Is it the task of literature to produce a counter-politics of memory, or is it rather to resist the demands of the political per se, to refuse to be instrumentalised in any cause?
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Losing the Plot: Crime, Reality and Fiction in Postapartheid Writing
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All the Good Things Around Us: An Anthology of African Short Stories
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Writing Home: Lewis Nkosi on South African Writing
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Margaret Laurence Writes Africa and Canada
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Insurgent Testimonies: Witnessing Colonial Trauma in Modern and Anglophone Literature
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Publishing Africa in French: Literary Institutions and Decolonization 1945-1967
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A Companion to Mia Couto
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Insurgent Testimonies: Witnessing Colonial Trauma in Modern and Anglophone Literature
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Narrating the Nation in the African Novel: Chinua Achebe, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, Ayi Kwei Armah and Kofi Awoonor
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A Companion to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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Contemporary African Cinema
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The Desiring Modes of Being Black: Literature and Critical Theory
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The Immigrant Kitchen: Food, Ethnicity, and Diaspora
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The Art of Survival: Depictions of Zimbabwe and the Zimbabwean in Crisis
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In Search of the Afropolitan: Encounters, Conversations, and Contemporary Diasporic African Literature
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Committed to Disillusion: Activist Writers in Egypt from the 1960s - 1980s
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Shakespeare in Swahililand: In Search of a Global Poet
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Dynamics of Distancing in Nigerian Drama: A Functional Approach to Metatheatre
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Learning Zulu: A Secret History of Language in South Africa
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Rwanda Genocide Stories: Fiction After 1994
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