Speaking back to the abuse of white-dominated, patriarchal power

Part literary history, part feminist historiography, And Wrote My Story Anyway: Black South African Women’s Novels as Feminism critically examines influential novels in English by eminent black female writers.

Studying these writers’ key engagements with nationalism, race and gender during apartheid and the transition to democracy, Barbara Boswell traces the ways in which black women’s fiction critically interrogates narrow ideas of nationalism. She examines who is included and excluded while producing alternative visions for a more just South African society.

This is an erudite analysis of 10 well-known writers, spanning both the apartheid and post-apartheid eras: Miriam Tlali, Lauretta Ngcobo, Farida Karodia, Agnes Sam, Sindiwe Magona, Zoë Wicomb, Rayda Jacobs, Yvette Christiansë, Kagiso Lesego Molope and Zukiswa Wanner.

Boswell argues that black women’s fiction could and should be read as a subversive site of knowledge production in a setting which, for centuries, denied black women’s voices and intellects.

Reading their fiction as theory, for the first time these writers’ works are placed in sustained conversation with one another, producing an arc of feminist criticism that speaks forcefully back to the abuse of a racist, white-dominated, patriarchal power.

• Article provided by Wits University Press