South African Literature after the Truth Commission

SHANE GRAHAM is an Assistant Professor of English at Utah State University, USA and was formerly a Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa.

"Shane Graham's compelling new study brings a thematic order to the vast and generically diverse body of literature produced in post-apartheid South African. Generously inclusive and interdisciplinary, the study is nevertheless conceptually unified by an effort to understand the connection between bodies, places, and memory: a nexus that Graham teases out in a series of deft, lucid, and judicious readings. South African Literature After the Truth Commission is an unfailingly intelligent and readable book and will prove to be an indispensable scholarly resource." - Rita Barnard, Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania, author of Apartheid and Beyond: South African Writers and the Politics of Place "It has often been remarked that following the political transition in South Africa, the country's literature took an inward turn. From a literature in which the need to bear witness was all-powerful, the emphasis began to fall on autobiography and confession, memory, and aesthetic and moral self-reflection. Shane Graham's account of post-apartheid literature complicates that picture: immensely well informed, his astute and lucid analyses show how the inward turn of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has turned outward, leaving its mark on the public and social spaces of a fledgling and still struggling democracy." - David Attwell, Professor and Head of English, University of York, UK, author of Rewriting Modernity: Studies in Black South African Literary History

• Introduction: Mapping Loss PART I: SPACES OF TRUTH-TELLING: THE TRC AND POST-APARTHEID LITERATURES OF MEMORY The Calcification of Memory: The Story I Am About To Tell and He Left Quietly A Theatre of Displacement: Ubu and the Truth Commission The Lie Where the Truth is Closest: Antjie Krog's Country of My Skull Words That Look Like Acts: Ingrid de Kok's Transfer and Terrestrial Things Irredeemable Blood, Irretrievable Loss: Sindiwe Magona's Mother To Mother Conclusion, Part I PART II: POST-APARTHEID URBAN SPACES Peace Through Amnesia: Achmat Dangor's Bitter Fruit The City Dissected: Ivan Vladislavic's The Exploded View Linguistic Trips: Phaswane Mpe's Welcome To Our Hillbrow Peripatetic Mapping: K. Sello Duiker's The Quiet Violence of Dreams Excavating the City: Aziz Hassim's The Lotus People Conclusion, Part II PART III: EXCAVATIONS AND THE MEMORY OF LANDSCAPES A Map of Echoes: Anne Landsman's The Devil's Chimney Buried Footprints: Zoë Wicomb's David's Story Burdened by the Scars of History: Zakes Mda's The Heart of Redness Conclusion, Part III Conclusion