South African Transition in the Literary Imagination: Nadine Gordimer, J.M. Coetzee, Malika Lueen Ndlovu

Abstract

This chapter explores the relationship between cultural products and historical change, examining how contemporary South African writers engage with South Africa’s past and present, writing ‘Transition’ into the literary imagination. ‘Transition’ is one of the terms which is used to describe the period between 1990 and 1994 — that is, between Nelson Mandela’s release from prison and his election as President; it is also referred to as ‘dismantling apartheid’ and ‘the creation of the Rainbow Nation’. In the public sphere, this process of dismantling was carried out in newspapers, political speeches and texts. This chapter examines the cultural importance of literary texts which hold up a mirror to transitional processes, offering a space where fears and misgivings which may not have a place in official discourse can be thematized. Acting as a container and giving a ‘name to what has no name, especially to what the language of politics excludes’, literature acts as ‘one of a society‘s instruments of self-awareness … because its origins are connected with the origins of various types of knowledge, various codes, various forms of critical thought’.¹