Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Literature As Social Barometer In Post-Apartheid South Africa: Reading Contemprorary 'White Writing', Antonio Simoes Da Silva

Tony Simoes da Silva

Contemporary South African literature shows a renewed concern with the close bonds between land, place and people in the New South Africa. In the post-apartheid period, this is literature that reflects a close awareness of the need for an art that retains both a sense of creative integrity and the ethical and political demands of the narrative of the new, postapartheid nation. Often history is invoked not as the deterministic frame that regulates each character’s lives typical of so much of the country’s literature, but as the accumulated mesh of individual experiences encompassed by the historical narrative. More to the …