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Rita Barnard. Apartheid and Beyond: South African Writers and the Politics of Place. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. xii + 221 pp.
In a poignant paraphrase of J. M. Coetzee's commentary on Nabokov, Rita Barnard suggests that "one must look at the past with a cruel enough eye to see what made its joy and innocence possible" (32). Apartheid and Beyond: South African Writers and the Politics of Place, Barnard's critical reading of five of South Africa's best-known contributors to the narratives-and its drama-of both the struggle against the legendarily oppressive regime of apartheid and its incipient probing toward novel renovations, both textual and socio-political, takes just such a "look at the past." While the critic's own eye is not a "cruel" one, her review does offer an unflinchingly piercing retrospective on what have become the classics of that long, still being drawn-out, story: Coetzee's Life and Times of Michael K, Nadine Gordimer's July's People and Burger's Daughter among others, Athol Fugard's Tsotsi and A Lesson from Aloes, Miriam Tlali's Muriel at Metropolitan, and Zakes Mda's The Heart of Redness. Barnard makes clear in her introduction that she is reconsidering the period from 1948 to 2000, from the election of the National Party to the millennium-forty-one years of apartheid (1948-1989), five years of negotiated transition (1989-1994), and six years of South Africa's new post-apartheid, or "beyond" apartheid, democratic dispensation (1994-2000).
At stake in Apartheid and Beyond, however, is not only that historical scenario, but also its geographical axes as well, the "politics of place," as the subtitle indicates. Barnard emphasizes, in her literary critical analyses, the "way in which writing for or from a particular location makes a difference in the form and significance of a text" (3). Apartheid and Beyond, in other words, proposes nothing short of a "geographical history of South Africa" (9). That "geographical history" is formatted along largely conventional literary-critical lines: following the introduction and its focus on the "impact of apartheid on literary critical...