Trauma, Resistance, Reconstruction in Post-1994 South African Writing

Scholars of English literature in South Africa, Britain, the US, and France explore the textual strategies by which post-apartheid South Africa reconciles the trauma and violence of the past within the country's literary and cultural traditions. The 11 essays cover memory and the construction of identities; truth, reconciliation, resistance, and reconstruction; damaged narratives, silenced voices, and race; and trauma, confession, and autobiographies. Among their topics are memory and identity in Elleke Boehmer's Bloodlines and Zoe Wicomb's David's Story and Playing in the Light, reconstruction and resistance in the poetry of Gcina Mhlophe, settler myth in Andre Brink's Devil's Valley, and transmogrifying the traumatic into the democratic ideal in Nelson Mandela's autobiographical The Long Walk to Freedom. There is no index. Annotation c2010 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Jaspal K. Singh is a Professor of English Literature at Northern Michigan University where she teaches postcolonial African and South Asian literature and theory. Singh’s previous book is entitled Representation and Resistance: South Asian and African Women’s Texts at Home and in the Diaspora (2008). Her co-edited anthology is entitled Indian Writers: Transnationalisms and Diasporas (Lang, 2010).
Rajendra Chetty is the Head of Department (Research), and Faculty of Education and Social Sciences at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology in South Africa. He is the editor of South African Indian Writings in English (2002) and co-editor of Indias Abroad: The Diaspora Writes Back (2004), and Indian Writers: Trans-nationalisms and Diasporas (Lang, 2010).