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Alice Brittan

Department of English

Dalhousie University

Abstract: 

One of Nadine Gordimer’s best-known novels, July’s People (1981), imagines the overthrow of South Africa’s apartheid regime by black revolutionaries whose recruits are summoned by an amplifier that is carried from village to village.  In her non-fiction writing Gordimer has often described corrupt political power and its effects by using material metaphors of size, a tactic that echoes throughout the language of political rule and anti-government resistance in apartheid South Africa and that is traceable to nineteenth and early-twentieth century conflicts among African workers, British administrators, and Afrikaner nationalists.  In order to understand why Gordimer connects revolution in July’s People with radical transformations in physical scale and systems of measurement, this paper explores a problem that haunted the nineteenth-century liberal philosophy of civilization through commerce, and came to dominate twentieth-century responses to the ‘native question,’ reaching absurd and appalling heights under the administration of the Afrikaner Nationalist Party:  the nature and limits of the relation between African consumption of British goods and claims to social and economic equality.

This paper argues that apartheid sought to destroy the dangerous equivalence between British goods and social power.  In order to the eliminate the political threat posed by material similarities across racial lines, the Nationalist government attempted, with startling literalness, to consign Africans to a world of imitative, surrogate, and diminished objects.  The aesthetic terms in which July’s People forecasts apartheid’s defeat borrow and reverse the historical terms in which apartheid defined itself as a political system, and labored for over four decades to enforce what in the 1980s Prime Minister Botha called the Afrikaner’s “sense of proportion.”  

Gordimer's Ideoscapes

Rita Barnard

Department of English

University of Pennsylvania 

Abstract:

The immediate focus of this paper is Nadine Gordimer's 1979 novel Burger's Daughter, but it is attentive also to what I see as the single most important preoccupation in Gordimer's fiction and critical writings: an examination of the intimate relationship between politics, subjectivity, and space. I argue that the novel associates each of the conflicting political positions with which it engages (that of the Communist Lionel Burger, that of the National Party ideologue Brand Vermeulen, and that of the rising Black Consciousness movement) with a characteristic "ideoscape"--a term I borrow, of course, from Arjun Appadurai. I suggest that Burger's Daughter, which is usually seen in terms of a tension between the personal and the political, also sets up a productive tension between local and the global, or, more exactly, between national and international political commitments. In conclusion, I step back from the text itself and briefly consider what the publication and reception history of the novel (specifically, its banning and subsequent unbanning by the South African Censorship Board) tells us about the location of South African literary culture: the fact that it is addressed to and shaped by a local as well as an international readership. Though concerned with questions of place rather than scale, the idea of the "imagined world," which may be geographically expansive or restrictive, connects this paper to the Ethnohistory Workshop's collective meditation for this year.