Against Normalization

Writing Radical Democracy in South Africa

Datos Bibliográficos

ID19916624
AutoresAnthony O’brien (0000-0002-1957-3699, autor de correspondencia), Anthony O'Brien, Fredric Jameson, Stanley Fish
Año2001
Páginas350
Fecha de publicación2001-01-01
Open AccessNo
TipoBOOK
RevistaAgainst Normalization (SOURCE_BOOK)
EditorialDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/9780822380634
OpenAlexW4247176986
Open LibraryOL6789014M
ISBN9780822380634
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas13

Normalization or Radical DemocracyThe shape this book has taken reflects the momentous changes in South Africa during the time of its composition.Writing between 1992 and 1998 on radical impulses in South African literature and politics in the 1980s, I began with a sense of the high tide of antiapartheid struggle in the late eighties as the vivid present, both of South African culture and of its representations abroad.Gradually, however, it became clear that 1990, with the release of Mandela and the somewhat demobilizing onset of negotiations, marked the waning of the resonant insurgency and militant hope of the Mass Democratic Movement of that period.With a growing awareness of how the South African transition was shifting the questions posed to radical imagination and interpretation (including their ramifications in global culture and politics), the book became more and more a retrospect on the 1980s, apparent especially in chapter 3, which directly addresses the political and cultural theory of the transition, and also in the book's framing between chapter 1, which interprets the writing of the 1994 election, and the epilogue, which discusses two works of the late nineties, Nadine Gordimer's 1998 novel, The House Gun, and Ramadan Suleman's film Fools.My readings of the radical eighties in the intervening chapters are thus embedded in an engagement with a putatively ''normalized'' postapartheid culture, and came to be a contestatory argument precisely against any nor

Aesthetics · Art · Democracy · Framing (construction) · Literature · Militant · Negotiation · Normalization (sociology) · Political radicalism · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Anthropology · Archaeology and Rock Art Studies · Gender Studies · History · Law · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · South African History and Culture · 1994 · 20th century · Democracy in literature · History and criticism · politics and government · Politics and literature · Politics in literature · Radicalism · Radicalism in literature · South Africa · South African literature · South African literature (English) · South african literature, history and criticism