At the end of apartheid, under pressure from local and
transnational capital and the hegemony of Western-style
parliamentary democracy, South Africans felt called upon to
normalize their conceptions of economics, politics, and culture in
line with these Western models. In Against Normalization, however,
Anthony O'Brien examines recent South African literature and
theoretical debate which take a different line, resisting this
neocolonial outcome, and investigating the role of culture in the
formation of a more radically democratic society. O'Brien brings
together an unusual array of contemporary South African writing:
cultural theory and debate, worker poetry, black and white feminist
writing, Black Consciousness drama, the letters of exiled writers,
and postapartheid fiction and film. Paying subtle attention to
well-known figures like Nadine Gordimer, Bessie Head, and Njabulo
Ndebele, but also foregrounding less-studied writers like Ingrid de
Kok, Nise Malange, Maishe Maponya, and the Zimbabwean Dambudzo
Marechera, he reveals in their work the construction of a political
aesthetic more radically democratic than the current normalization
of nationalism, ballot-box democracy, and liberal humanism in
culture could imagine. Juxtaposing his readings of these writers
with the theoretical traditions of postcolonial thinkers about
race, gender, and nation like Paul Gilroy, bell hooks, and Gayatri
Spivak, and with others such as Samuel Beckett and Vaclav Havel,
O'Brien adopts a uniquely comparatist and internationalist approach
to understanding South African writing and its relationship to the
cultural settlement after apartheid. With its appeal to specialists
in South African fiction, poetry, history, and politics, to other
Africanists, and to those in the fields of colonial, postcolonial,
race, and gender studies, Against Normalization will make a
significant intervention in the debates about cultural production
in the postcolonial areas of global capitalism.
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