That "Ugly Word": Miscegenation and the Novel in Preapartheid South Africa

This essay outlines the part played by miscegenation (crossracial sex) in the elaboration of racial identity in South Africa before 1948. It explores representations of miscegenation, and links between miscegenation and "racechange", in South African English novels of this period, including Perceval Gibbon's Souls in Bondage and Margaret Harding, William Plomer's Turbott Wolfe, Peter Abrahams's The Path of Thunder, and particularly Sarah Gertrude Millin's God's Stepchildren. It reads these novels as developing a stock theme in South African literature, and as exemplary of the interplay between history, ethics, and aesthetics in the genre of the novel.