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  • Knowing One's Place:South African Writing and the Paradoxes of Postcolonial Belonging
  • Sarah Phillips Casteel (bio)
Rita Barnard , Apartheid and Beyond: South African Writers and the Politics of Place. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. xii + 221 pp. $55.00.

Rita Barnard's timely and compelling study Apartheid and Beyond: South African Writers and the Politics of Place is one of a number of recent works of postcolonial literary criticism to apply insights from the field of cultural geography to yield fresh perspectives on literary texts. The spatial turn in critical theory has proved especially salutary for postcolonial studies, enabling a new understanding of the production of (post)colonial, diasporic, and globalized environments. For as Barnard observes, "nowhere is the question of land, of territory and power, as pertinent and contested as in the long and continuing history of imperialism" (5). Accordingly, she draws on theorists of social space, such as Edward Soja and Michel de Certeau, as well as on geographers of contemporary South Africa, such as John Western, to develop revisionary readings of South African literature and to trace the transition to a postapartheid literary production. Apartheid and Beyond demonstrates that privileging the spatial dimension affords a more nuanced appreciation of the relationships among fiction, character, and place in South African writing. In so doing, Barnard's study serves as a helpful corrective to the tendency she notes in South Africa literary criticism to privilege a journalistic-style documentation of the physical environment and to read place as straightforwardly mimetic. At the same time, Barnard brings a new sophistication to the analysis of place in (post)colonial settings [End Page 451] more generally, moving well beyond such traditional themes as the inadequacy of European aesthetic vocabularies to describe the colonial landscape.

Apartheid and Beyond identifies a series of dominant and emerging chronotopes in both major and lesser-known works by white and black South African writers. These chronotopes—which include the farm, the suburban home, and the urban high-rise—span a wide and eclectic range of rural and urban settings. Thus one of the welcome features of Barnard's study is that it avoids the current overemphasis on urban space in cultural and literary studies. The narrative arc of the book moves thematically and chronologically from white South African pastoral to black South African urbanism, and from apartheid's static conceptions of sharply segregated spaces to a more dynamic postapartheid vision of globalized, fluid landscapes. The dynamic shifts in literary production that Barnard traces from the apartheid era to the postapartheid period testify that "South African literature is still in some ways an emerging field of inquiry, and one that continues to require redefinition in view of changed circumstances in the country" (4).

The first half of Apartheid and Beyond, which is devoted to South Africa's three best-known white writers, begins with a discussion of J. M. Coetzee's literary and critical engagement with South African pastoral. Two chapters on Nadine Gordimer follow, the first an examination of character as a function of place (in particular the white suburban home and the street) in her writing, and the second a reading of The Conservationist (1974) as "the most deeply invested [of all South African novels] in the nation's master narrative about land" (70). In the fourth chapter, which interprets the category of place somewhat more loosely to encompass "dramatic space," Barnard shows how Athol Fugard's play A Lesson from Aloes (1981) employs botanical images of uprooting and transplantation to broach the fundamental question of "whether colonized land can seem like home to anyone, settler or native" (105).

The final two chapters of Apartheid and Beyond shift the focus of the book from white to black writing, in particular to black urban modes of geographical belonging. Here Barnard traces Miriam Tlali's and Zakes Mda's departure from realist representations of the black township, challenging Es'kia Mphahlele's doctrine of "the [End Page 452] tyranny of place," according to which the black writer finds himself compelled to document his oppressive material conditions. In Tlali's early novel Muriel at Metropolitan (1979), the shop serves as a microcosm of the spatial divisions enforced by...

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