Sarah Brouillette's Review of "English Heart, Hindi Heartland" by Rashmi Sadana (original) (raw)
Apartheid in Nadine Gordimer’s Conservationist
isara solutions, 2019
Nadine Gordimer, a towering figure of world literature, has been directly involved with the racial and cultural struggle of South Africa, South Africa as a country condenses, many major problems facing the world today, that of class, race and culture. As a writer, living in the world that she depicts in her novels, she is like an ‘inside observer’ who presents an 'inside history', of the lives and people of South Africa going through the transient phases of political upheavals. The political, social and literary situations prepared her mind to write against the exploitation and cruel policies of white rulers. We can say that there was something in her blood which revolted her against the white laws which segregated the blacks from white and made the native homeless in their own homeland.
Nadine Gordimer after apartheid : a reading strategy for the 1990s
1997
The aim of this study is to suggest, by selective example, a method of interpreting Gordimer's fiction from a 'post-Apartheid' perspective. My hypothesis is that Gordimer's own comments in her key lecture of 1982, "Living in the Interregnum", reflect not only her practice in the years of struggle politics, but suggest a yearning for a time beyond struggle, when the civil imaginary might again become a major subject. She claims that she has continually felt a tension in her practice as writer between her responsibility to 'national' testimony, her "necessary gesture" to the history of which she was indelibly a part, and her responsibility to the integrity of the individual experience, her "essential gesture" to novelistic truth.
Playing At Home: An Ecocritical Reading of Nadine Gordimer's 'The Pickup'
In Nadine Gordimer’s The Pickup, Julie Summers finds her sense of place in an unnamed desert country. By following the man she falls in love with back to his homeland, Julie must leave her comfortable cosmopolitan life behind. Although the text superficially presents the reader with this simple love story, the tone of the narration itself undermines Julie’s quest and troubles her easy adoption of a new home. This article draws on South African ecocritical and postcolonial approaches to explore the ways in which Julie’s privilege informs her relationship with her environments. Namely, this article is interested in showing how the text subtly questions whether a return to the land is possible in a context (of legacies of apartheid and realities of globalization) when land is never neutral (if it ever was). By framing her text around questions of citizenship tied to place, Gordimer presents a critique of the restorative power of the pastoral through the slippery character of Julie Summers.
Voice of Resistance: Exploring Apartheid, Power, and Race in Nadine Gordimer's Selected Novels
This research article interprets Gordimer's novels as an expression of resistance against black oppression in pre-apartheid South Africa. Looking at her insightful and evocative depictions of some of the major political issues in selected works, the present work discusses their relevance and importance in the contemporary world. The current paper uses a qualitative approach to examine the impact of the apartheid regime on individuals and communities in South Africa, as well as the impact of political events on individuals, the author's preoccupation with power and its impact on people's lives as well as her treatment of race and related issues. Gordimer highlights how political events and power structures can influence and disrupt the lives of individuals and communities through her characters and their experiences. Her works offer a vivid and insightful critique of how apartheid regimes and other political systems are used to control and manipulate individuals and communities.
The Omnipresent Past: Dystopian Trends in Nadine Gordimer’s No Time Like the Present
World Journal of Education and Humanities
This paper seeks to analyze the dystopian character of Nadine Gordimer’s No Time Like the Present and demonstrate the claustrophobic nature of post-apartheid South Africa. The problem in this paper is to investigate the way in which Gordimer’s novel interprets the perceived socio-political evolution of her country. Our point of departure is that post-apartheid South Africa is not healed of its turbulent past and this past haunts and torments it till date. This article foregrounds the argument that the dystopian nature of Gordimer’s last novel is evident in the fact it captures the crash of dreams for an egalitarian, non-racial society; it portrays the repression and failure of individual efforts to improve society; and it describes poverty, violence and anarchy as society’s unchanging norms. Using postcolonial literary theory, this paper shows how No Time Like the Present narrates the entanglement of South Africans at a time when political morass and socio-economic inequalities abor...
The Narrative Construction of National Identity in Nadine Gordimer’s July’s People
Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, 2023
At a time when Gordimer was writing her short stories and novels which stretched over four decades beginning from the 1940s to the 1990s, several historical and political events were taking place in South Africa. Gordimer's entire oeuvre of fiction was her way of responding to those historical and political events that unfolded in the country. Many writers and critics believed that the history of the Nationalist Government from 1948 onwards has been faithfully recorded by the novels of Nadine Gordimer and they "will provide the future historian with all the evidence required to evaluate the price that has been paid by the people". (Green, 563) She published her first collection of short stories in 1949, a year after the first Nationalist Government was elected to power. Her body of work from 1949 to 2000 covers the entire period of apartheid in South Africa. Therefore, she was a writer with serious intent and meant to convey through her novels her rigid stand against apartheid. The term 'apartheid' means 'apartness', a policy meant to segregate people on the foundation of their race and colour. In The Essential Gesture: Writing, Politics and Places (1988), Gordimer noted that it was not the "problems" of her country that set her to writing; rather, it was learning to write that sent her "falling, falling through the surface of the South African way of life". (Gordimer 1988, p. 272) This paper shall attempt to study how Gordimer constructs identity in her novel July's People (1981). The paper posits that the most important theme in Gordimer's novels has been identity, an issue that she has been dealing with since her childhood, due to her situation as the daughter of immigrant parents, and living and writing in South Africa at a time when her country was divided based on colour.
The centrality of location in post-apartheid fiction is a crucial point which gives birth to interesting considerations on social and individual life. The introduction of innovative viewpoints in narrative is often rendered through a different perception of space, as well as through the presence of additional spatial dimensions intended as symbolic accounts of inner evolutions. The following paper deals with an analysis of real and imaginary spaces in two post-apartheid novels, The Madonna of Excelsior by Zakes Mda and The Pickup by Nadine Gordimer. The presence of "real" and "imaginary" sites in the two narratives fosters the function of location as a means of building one's own new personality. Therefore, the perception of space in these novels becomes a fundamental element in the construction of new post-apartheid identities.