State of Peril

Lucy Valerie Graham is a lecturer in English at Stellenbosch University.

State of Peril effectively remaps the corpus of South African literature to produce an alternative trajectory which highlights issues of race and gender violence ... [It] constitutes an important intervention in the proliferating discourses on sexual violence at the present time, as it goes a long way in demystifying the long and problematic history of racist representations in relation to rape.

• Preface ; Introduction ; 1. Danger and Desire: Rape and Seduction in the Colonial Imagination ; "Wild Savages" and "Treasure Chests": ; Rape and Romance in Southern African Contact Narratives ; "A Black Woman Wasn't White!": Race and Rape in Olive Schreiner's Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland ; "The Inexpiable Outrage Remains": ; Black Combatants, Chivalry and the South African War ; 2. "Like a White Man": "Black Peril", Print Culture and ; Political Voice in the Making of the Union ; "Wholly Bestial and Mad with Burning Revenge": ; (Dis)enfranchisement and Contest in Francis Bancroft's Of Like Passions ; "Catching her by the Throat": ; Political and Literary Struggles in George Webb Hardy's The Black Peril ; "His Sonorous Voice": ; George Heaton Nicholls Bayete! and the Black Vote ; 3. "A 'Black' or a 'White' Peril?": Writing the Melancholy (Alter)Nation ; Daphne Rooke's Mittee in America and South Africa ; 4. Restaging Rape: Black Writing and Sexual Apartheid ; "Black Peril" and Mimicry in Arthur Maimane's Victims ; "White Peril" Narratives by Farida Karodia and Lauretta Ngcobo ; "When Victims Spit on Victims": ; Intraracial Rape in Short Stories by Njabulo Ndebele, Gcina Mhlophe ; and Baleka Kgositile ; 5. "History Speaking": Sexual Violence and Post-Apartheid Narratives ; Reading the Unspeakable: Rape in J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace ; Traces of Violation in Achmat Dangor's Bitter Fruit ; and Zoe Wicomb's David's Story ; "(Not) Like a Woman": ; Male Rape in Bildungsromane of the Post-Apartheid Transition ; "Save Us All": Tshepang and the New Nation ; Conclusion ; Bibliography ; Index