‘Imagine Someone Speaking as They Speak’: Linguistic Divide and Convoluted Cross-Cultural Exchange in Nadine Gordimer’s Apartheid-Era Work

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dc.contributor.authorAndindilile, Michael
dc.date.accessioned2016-09-22T18:29:23Z
dc.date.available2016-09-22T18:29:23Z
dc.date.issued2013
dc.description.abstractNadine Gordimer’s delicate, perceptive, and oftentimes idiosyncratic treatment of controversial issues has received a lot of critical enquiry. Scant attention, however, has been paid to how Gordimer’s critical appraisal of apartheid policies emerges from her attempt to concretely embody African languages, discourses, and cultures in her fiction. This essay, therefore, revisits Gordimer’s apartheid-era fiction to examine how the representation of a range of discourses in Gordimer’s fiction constitutes a means through which she appraises apartheid power relations and the effects of divisive policies. The paper argues that Gordimer’s treatise on apartheid and its divisive policies is manifested in her attempt to embody African discourses in her apartheid-era fiction. In this paper, I rely on Foucault’s definition of discourse as “ways of constituting knowledge, together with the social practices, forms of subjectivity and power relations which inhere in such knowledges and relations between them . . . [d]iscourses [that] are more than ways of thinking and producing meaning. . . . They constitute the ‘nature’ of the body, unconscious and conscious mind and emotional life of the subjects they seek to govern” (qtd. in Weedon 108). They are also “a form of power that circulates in the social field and can attach to strategies of domination as well as those of resistance” (qtd. in Diamond and Quinby 185). Both of these definitions refer to discourse not as an innocent act, but one that conditions subjects in their social, cultural and economic interactions.en_US
dc.identifier.citationAndindilile, M., 2013. ‘Imagine Someone Speaking as They Speak’: Linguistic Divide and Convoluted Cross-Cultural Exchange in Nadine Gordimer’s Apartheid-Era Work. Postcolonial Text, 8(1).en_US
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11810/4258
dc.language.isoenen_US
dc.title‘Imagine Someone Speaking as They Speak’: Linguistic Divide and Convoluted Cross-Cultural Exchange in Nadine Gordimer’s Apartheid-Era Worken_US
dc.typeJournal Article, Peer Revieweden_US
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