Entanglement

Literary and Cultural Reflections on Post-apartheid

This original book is a much needed and far reaching exploration of post-apartheid South African life worlds. Entanglement aims to capture the contradictory mixture of innovation and inertia, of loss, violence and xenophobia as well as experimentation and desegregation, which characterises the present.

The author explores the concept of entanglement in relation to readings of literature, new media forms and painting. In the process, she moves away from a persistent apartheid optic, drawing on ideas of sameness and difference, and their limits, in order to elicit ways of living and imagining that are just starting to take shape and for which we might not yet have a name.

In the background of her investigations lies a preoccupation with a future-oriented politics, one that builds on largely unexplored terrains of mutuality while being attentive to a historical experience of confrontation and injury.

Sarah Nuttall is Associate Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER), University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. She is co-editor of Text, Theory, Space: Land, Literature and History in South Africa and Australia (Rutledge, 1996), Negotiating the Past: The Making of Memory in South Africa (Oxford University Press, 1998), and Senses of Culture: South African Culture Studies (Oxford University Press, 2000). She is the editor of Beautiful/Ugly: African and Diaspora Aesthetics (Duke University Press 2004); and author of At Risk: Writing On and Over the Edge of South Africa (Jonathan Ball, 2007). She is also co-editor of Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis (with Wits University Press and Duke University Press, 2008).

978 1 86814 476 1                Soft cover, 220 x 150 mm, 216 pp                       March 2009