What Happened To Burger S Daughter Or How South African Censorship Works

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

A critical assessment of literature produced under censorship needs to take into account that the strategies of the censors are answered by strategies of the writers and the readers. To recognize self-censoring strategies in writing, it is necessary to know the specific restrictions of the censorship regime in question. In South Africa under apartheid all writers were confronted with the question of how to respond to the pressure of censorship. This confrontation took a different form however, depending on what group the writer belonged to and what language he/she used. By looking at white writers writing in Afrikaans and white and black writers writing in English, this book gives the impact of censorship on South African literature a comparative examination which it has not received before. The book considers works by J. M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Andre Brink, and others less known to readers outside South Africa like Karel Schoeman, Louis Kruger, Christopher Hope, Miriam Tlali and Mtutuzeli Matshoba. It treats the censorship laws of the apartheid regime as well as, in the final chapter, the new law of the Mandela government which shows some surprising similarities to its predecessor.

South African writer Nadine Gordimer won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991. Her seventh novel, Burger's Daughter, focuses upon the daughter of a white, communist Afrikaner hero. Based partly on fact, successively banned and unbanned by the South African authorities, the novel has also become something of a test case for feminist critics of Gordimer's writing. This casebook includes an interview with and an essay by Nadine Gordimer on the novel, classic and recent critical essays, an introduction discussing biographical and historical contexts and the literary reception, and a bibliography.

Nadine Gordimer is one of the most important writers to emerge in the twentieth century. Her anti-Apartheid novel July's People (1981) is a powerful example of resistance writing and continues even now to unsettle easy assumptions about issues of power, race, gender and identity. This guide to Gordimer's compelling novel offers: an accessible introduction to the text and contexts of July's People a critical history, surveying the many interpretations of the text from publication to the present a selection of new and reprinted critical essays on July's People, providing a range of perspectives on the novel and extending the coverage of key approaches identified in the critical survey cross-references between sections of the guide, in order to suggest links between texts, contexts and criticism suggestions for further reading. Part of the Routledge Guides to Literature series, this volume is essential reading for all those beginning detailed study of July's People and seeking not only a guide to the novel, but a way through the wealth of contextual and critical material that surrounds Gordimer's text.

Situated at the intersection of the colonial and the postcolonial, the modern and the postmodern, the novelists Christina Stead, Doris Lessing, and Nadine Gordimer all bear witness to this century's global transformations. From the Margins of Empire looks at how the question of national identity is constructed in their writings. These authors—white women who were born or grew up in British colonies or former colonies—reflect the subject of national identity in vastly different ways in both their lives and their work. Stead, who resided outside of her native Australia, has an unsettled identity. Lessing, who grew up in southern Rhodesia and migrated to England, is or has become English. Gordimer, who was born in South Africa and remains there, considers herself South African. Louise Yelin shows how the three writers' different national identities are inscribed in their fiction. The invented, hybrid character of nationality is, she maintains, a constant throughout. Locating the writings of Stead, Lessing, and Gordimer in the national cultures that produced and read them, she considers the questions they raise about the roles that whites, especially white women, can play in the new political and cultural order.

A critical assessment of literature produced under censorship needs to take into account that the strategies of the censors are answered by strategies of the writers and the readers. To recognize self-censoring strategies in writing, it is necessary to know the specific restrictions of the censorship regime in question. In South Africa under apartheid all writers were confronted with the question of how to respond to the pressure of censorship. This confrontation took a different form however, depending on what group the writer belonged to and what language he/she used. By looking at white writers writing in Afrikaans and white and black writers writing in English, this book gives the impact of censorship on South African literature a comparative examination which it has not received before. The book considers works by J. M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Andre Brink, and others less known to readers outside South Africa like Karel Schoeman, Louis Kruger, Christopher Hope, Miriam Tlali and Mtutuzeli Matshoba. It treats the censorship laws of the apartheid regime as well as, in the final chapter, the new law of the Mandela government which shows some surprising similarities to its predecessor.

Over the past fifty years transformations of great moment have taken place in South Africa. Apartheid and the subsequent transition to a democratic, non-racial society in particular have exercised a profound effect on the practice of literature. This study traces the development of literature under apartheid, then seeks to identify the ways in which writers and theatre practitioners are now facing the challenges of a new social order. The main focus is on the work of black writers, prime among them Matsemela Manaka, Mtutuzeli Matshoba and Richard Rive, who, as politically committed members of the oppressed majority, bore witness to the "black experience" through their writing. Despite the draconian censorship system they were able to address the social problems caused by racial discrimination in all areas of life, particularly through forced removals, the migrant labour system, and the creation of the homelands. Their writing may be read both as a comprehensive record of everyday life under apartheid and as an alternative cultural history of South Africa. Particular attention is paid to theatre as a barometer of social change in South Africa. The concluding chapters consider how in the current period of transition writers and arts institutions have set about reassessing their priorities, redefining their function and seeking new aesthetic directions in taking up the challenge of imagining a new society.