Synopses & Reviews
Nahem Yousaf explores the novels of Alex La Guma to reveal their contrasts, their multifaceted dialogues with apartheid, and what they inform us about the oppressive nature of the apartheid system that strove to deny non-whites their humanity. All of La Guma's fiction is overtly political in that he sought to reclaim a place and subjectivity for blacks through his creative writing. All of his writings deal with the violence of apartheid and regard violence as an inevitable aspect of anti-apartheid struggles. Conceiving the role of the writer in the same terms as that of the revolutionary freedom fighter, La Guma's writings reflect the realizations of the African National Congress leadership that only through violent resistance against apartheid would the oppressed find liberation. Although some literary critics regard La Guma's fiction as one dimensional and flat, Yousaf argues that La Guma's characters reveal fully the complexities and contradictions of life under apartheid.
Review
...his book will be useful to academic audiences at the upper-division undergraduate level and above. It is clearly written, well footnoted, and has a satisfactory bibliography.Choice
Synopsis
Explores the multifaceted dialogues with apartheid that are found in the novels.
About the Author
Nahem Yousaf is Senior Lecturer in English at the Nottingham Trent University
Table of Contents
Preface; Writing and Resistance; Problems of Limited Political Understanding: A Walk in the Night ; Border Crossings: The Germination of a Political Consciousness in And A Threefold Cord ; Resistance from Within the Prison of Apartheid: The Stone Country ; Making History: Politics and Violence in In the Fog of the Seasons' End ; Conceptualization and Contextualization: Time of the Butcherbird ; Towards Post-Apartheid Narratives; Bibliography; Index.