Abstract
Albie Sachs, a writer and lawyer in exile with the ANC who lost an arm to a South African bomb, returned to South Africa in 1990; his position paper on aesthetic policy, ‘Preparing ourselves for freedom,’ aroused enormous interest there. It proposes that the activity of writers and artists be less politically focused, and less limited to the politically correct, than has hitherto been ANC policy; in perhaps its most polemical moment, the paper calls for a five-year moratorium on the phrase ‘culture is a weapon of struggle’.
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Notes
Albie Sachs, ‘Preparing ourselves for freedom’, paper prepared for an ANC in-house seminar on culture, 1989, quoted from Ingrid de Kok and Karen Press (eds), Spring is Rebellious: Arguments about cultural freedom by Albie Sachs and respondents (Cape Town: Buchu books, 1990), p. 20. Sachs does not refer to the question whether the Communist Sholokhov in fact composed And Quiet Flows the Don or whether, as has been suggested, he adapted it from the manuscript of a deceased White Russian, which would make it a less perfect example of what Sachs intends.
Michael Wade, Nadine Gordimer (London: Evans Brothers, 1978), pp. 190–227. See especially pp. 201–3.
John Cooke, The Novels of Nadine Gordimer: Private Lives/Public Landscapes (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985), pp. 148–64. See especially pp. 150–1 and p. 163. For the claim that Gordimer identifies excessively with the Africans at the book’s end, see pp. 212–13.
Stephen R. Clingman, The Novels of Nadine Gordimer: History from the Inside (Johannesburg: Ravan, 1986), pp. 135–69.
Compare, e.g. Andre Viola, ‘The Irony of Tenses in Nadine Gordimer’s The Conservationist’, Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, Vol. 19, no. 4 (October 1988), p. 53: ‘the appeased tone of the concluding lines unambiguously contrasts with the quasi-childless and rootless Mehring in their [sic] serene implication of a future that promises the Africans posterity and legitimate possession of the land’.
See Lars Engle, ‘The Political Uncanny: The Novels of Nadine Gordimer’, The Yale Journal of Criticism, Vol. 2, no. 2, Fall 1989, pp. 101–25.
In the following series of citations of passages in which Gordimer quotes Callaway, I cite page numbers from both works parenthetically, abbreviating Callaway’s title as Religious System and retaining Gordimer’s italics. See Nadine Gordimer, The Conservationist (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974) and the
Reverend H. Callaway, The Religious System of the Amazulu, facsimile (Cape Town: Struik, 1970).
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© 1993 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Engle, L. (1993). The Conservationist and the Political Uncanny. In: King, B. (eds) The Later Fiction of Nadine Gordimer. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22682-5_7
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