Fantasy States
Nationalism, Intimacy, and Transgression in South African Women's Political Memoirs
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2228706 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Rachel Sandwell (0000-0002-4296-9317, McGill University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2022 |
| Volume | 47 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 765-787 |
| Publication date | 2022-03-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0097-9740 • E-ISSN: 1545-6943 |
| Publisher | University of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1086/717734 |
| OpenAlex | W4214705330 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 25 |
This article reads a set of South African women’s political memoirs as both propaganda pieces and fantasy texts. Inspired by Joan W. Scott’s recent explorations of feminist fantasy, the article draws attention to a set of scenes that recur across diverse political memoirs: scenes of interracial physical and domestic intimacy and scenes of collective national voyaging. Reading these depictions as fantasies, this article argues, lets us understand these women memoirists as propagandists for a national liberation cause. In their texts, these women espouse a particular and gendered nationalism that insists on public and private intimacy as a key component of a (fantasized) free South Africa, even as they acknowledge the unease inherent in seeking out these intimacies. This reading disrupts scholarly accounts that have tended to marginalize women as contributors to nationalist discourses, and it enables a deeper analysis of the tensions of race and interracial intimacy that beset the antiapartheid movement
Art · Art history · Fantasy · Literature · Memoir · Nationalism · Political science · Politics · Reading (process) · Sociology · Gender Studies · Gender, Security, and Conflict · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics · History · Law · South African History and Culture
Rethinking Documentary History and South African Political Biography
The Incommensurability of Psychoanalysis and History
The Family Politics of the Federation of South African Women
The impossible concept
In a Country where You couldn’t Make this Shit up”
The Fantasy of Feminist History
Gender Myths and Citizenship in Two Autobiographies by South African Women
The Work of the Nation
Gender, Shame, and the ‘Efficacy of Congress Methods of Struggle’ in 1959 Natal Women’s Rural Revolts
Lives in the Making
The Anatomy of National Fantasy
The speed of change
Two Stories about Art, Education, and Beauty in Twentieth-Century South Africa
Decolonising equality
Empire and Nation
Autobiography, History, Memory and Nostalgia in Denis Beckett'sRadical Middleand Hugh Lewin'sStones Against the Mirror
Pieces of a (Wo)man
Becoming Postcolonial
Family Feuds
Gendered silences in Nelson Mandela's and Ruth First's struggle auto/biographies
| Unique citing works | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,5 |
| Citation span | 2022 - 2026 (5) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |