Author: Ciahnan Quinn Darrell

Publisher:

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13:

This dissertation examines images of racialized and gendered violence in post-apartheid South African fiction, and attempts to locate such images within the socio-political and historical contexts that condition contemporary South African society. I begin with an investigation of the manner in which the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, intended to facilitate South Africa's transition from apartheid to a representative democracy, is both a direct descendent of the truth commissions of colonial jurisprudence, and a rupture of such laws, meant to instantiate a new model of interpersonal relations as the basis for a new South Africa. I argue that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's proceedings represent an attempt to contravene racist and sexist violence by elaborating a model of interpersonal relations no longer predicated on domination, but characterized by openness and reciprocity. I further comment on the hindrance posed by regressive modes of governance, neoliberal models of social engineering, and economic inequality to the actualization of a post-apartheid dispensation. Following Mark Sanders' assertion that the work of the TRC and that of the post-apartheid novelist are structurally and thematically similar, the remainder of this dissertation investigates literary avenues that might allow South Africa to move beyond violence toward reciprocity and the affirmation of otherness. Central to my analysis are J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace and Zo± Wicomb's David's Story, both of which wrestle with the problems inherent in producing images of acts of violence inflicted on racialized, gendered bodies, challenging simplistic accounts of race, gender, and the intersection of the two in their representations of gendered violence. Disgrace juxtaposes a white man's rape of a coloured woman, the gang rape of a white woman by a group of black men, and the white protagonist's metaphorical rape of his daughter; while David's Story deals with rape, torture, and sexual violence perpetrated within the liberation forces of the African National Congress. From these readings, I propose an ethics of representation of sexual violence that calls upon writers to bear witness to the ongoing brutality, while simultaneously protecting the victims against objectification and preserving their agency. In my final chapter, I examine the politicization of sexuality, in particular gendered sexuality, in post-apartheid South Africa. The chapter engages two works of feminist erotica, a controversial genre of writing now flourishing in South Africa, in order to investigate the potential of women's pornography to serve as a site of women's subversive and empowering intervention within patriarchal discourse argue that (white) male-driven pornography appropriates women's sexuality within narratives that pose the racialized and gendered body as a site of vulnerability in need of male protection and subservient to male desire, and I claim that feminist erotica affords women opportunities for the reclamation, edification, and expression of their sexual agency that can contravene misogynistic narratives.