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The South African novel of identity that "deserves a wide audience on a par with Nadine Gordimer."
Juggling with our perception of time and reality, Still Life tells the story of an author struggling to write a biography of long-forgotten Scottish poet and abolitionist Thomas Pringle. A multitude of voices across time, place and the lines of fiction and history - From the spectre of Mary Prince to Virginia Woolf's own Sir Nicholas Green - vie for the reader's attention. Their adventures through time and space, from Victorian South Africa and London to the author's desk in Glasgow in the present day, offer a poignant exploration of colonial history and racial oppression.
A powerful post-apartheid novel and winner of South Africa’s M-Net Literary Award, hailed by J.M. Coetzee as “a tremendous achievement.” South Africa, 1991: Nelson Mandela is freed from prison, the African National Congress is now legal, and a new day dawns in Cape Town. David Dirkse, part of the underground world of activists, spies, and saboteurs in the liberation movement, suddenly finds himself above ground. With “time to think” after the unbanning of the movement, David searches his family tree, tracing his bloodline to the mixed-race “Coloured” people of South Africa and their antecedents among the indigenous people and early colonial settlers. But as David studies his ro...
A South African academic returns to her homeland in this novel by the award-winning author of You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town—“an extraordinary writer” (Toni Morrison). Winner of the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize, Zoë Wicomb is an essential voice of the South African diaspora, hailed by fellow writers—such as Toni Morrison and J. M. Coetzee, among others—and by reviewers as “a writer of rare brilliance” (The Scotsman). In October, Wicomb tells the story of Mercia Murray, a South African woman of color in the midst of a difficult homecoming. Abandoned by her partner in Scotland, where she has been living for twenty-six years, Mercia returns to South Africa to find her family overwhelmed by alcoholism and buried secrets. Poised between her new life in Scotland and her South African roots, Mercia recollects the past and assesses the present with a keen sense of irony. October is a stark and utterly compelling novel about the contemporary experience of a woman caught between cultures, adrift in middle age with her memories and an uncertain future.
“In her ambitious third novel, Wicomb explores South Africa’s history through a woman’s attempt to answer questions surrounding her past” (The New Yorker). Set in a beautifully rendered 1990s Cape Town, Windham Campbell Prize winner Zoë Wicomb’s celebrated novel revolves around Marion Campbell, who runs a travel agency but hates traveling, and who, in post-apartheid society, must negotiate the complexities of a knotty relationship with Brenda, her first black employee. As Alison McCulloch noted in the New York Times, “Wicomb deftly explores the ghastly soup of racism in all its unglory—denial, tradition, habit, stupidity, fear—and manages to do so without moralizing or becom...
These short stories from the award-winning South African author “combine the coolly interrogative gaze of the outsider with an insider’s intimate warmth” (J. M. Coetzee). Zoë Wicomb’s debut short story collection, You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town, won critical acclaim across the globe as well as high praise from fellow authors including Toni Morrison, J. M. Coetzee, Bharati Mukherjee, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Now, after two novels, Wicomb returns to the genre that first brought her international acclaim. Set mostly in the South African city of Cape Town, where Wicomb is from, and the Scottish city of Glasgow, where she now lives, this new collection of short stories straddle...
This is the first book on the fiction of Zoë Wicomb, whose work offers telling insights into questions of race and gender that have worldwide significance in their relation to postcolonialism. Focusing on the translocal, it demonstrates Wicomb's importance as a novelist, short-story writer, and critic. In tracking contemporary and historical relations between two localities, her fiction reveals a consistent interest in and interrogation of home and belonging, space and place. This book will make a vital contribution to current debates on migrancy and cosmopolitanism taking place in a number of disciplines, including literary studies, geography, politics, sociology, and history.
During the final years of the apartheid era and the subsequent transition to democracy, South African literary writing caught the world's attention as never before. Writers responded to the changing political situation and its daily impact on the country's inhabitants with works that recorded or satirised state-enforced racism, explored the possibilities of resistance and rebuilding, and creatively addressed the vexed question of literature's relation to politics and ethics. Writing South Africa offers a window on the literary activity of this extraordinary period that conveys its range (going well beyond a handful of world-renowned names) and its significance for anyone interested in the impact of decolonisation and democratisation on the cultural sphere. It brings together for the first time discussions by some of the most distinguished South African novelists, poets, and dramatists, with those of leading commentators based in South Africa, Britain and North America.
Snow on the Cane Fields was first published in 1995. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. In a probing analysis of creole women's writing over the past century, Judith Raiskin explores the workings and influence of cultural and linguistic colonialism. Tracing the transnational and racial meanings of creole identity, Raiskin looks at four English-speaking writers from South Africa and the Caribbean: Olive Schreiner, Jean Rhys, Michelle Cliff, and Zoë Wicomb. She examines their work in light of the discourses of their times: nineteenth-centu...
Winner, 2020 Alan Bray Memorial Prize, given by the GL/Q Caucus of the Modern Language Association A new understanding of freedom in the black diaspora grounded in the erotic In Frottage, Keguro Macharia weaves together histories and theories of blackness and sexuality to generate a fundamentally new understanding of both the black diaspora and queer studies. Macharia maintains that to reach this understanding, we must start from the black diaspora, which requires re-thinking not only the historical and theoretical utility of identity categories such as gay, lesbian, and bisexual, but also more foundational categories such as normative and non-normative, human and non-human. Simultaneously, ...