Reading through a Cold War lens: apartheid-era literature and the global conflict

bibliographic database
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Periodical article

Title:	Reading through a Cold War lens: apartheid-era literature and the global conflict
Author:	Popescu, Monica
Year:	2012
Periodical:	Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa (ISSN 2159-9130)
Volume:	24
Issue:	1
Pages:	37-49
Language:	English
Geographic term:	South Africa
Subjects:	literature literary history cold war
External link:	https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1013929X.2012.645358
Abstract:	This article argues that apartheid-era literature was shaped by the Cold War cultural and political landscape. With genres and narrative structures shared with Western literary traditions (such as spy fiction) or Eastern Bloc literatures (such as socialist realism), apartheid-era literature nonetheless retained its local concerns and features. Starting from three initial topoi (the border as a real and mental topography, political and individual secrets, and narratives of revolution and transformation), this article contends that South African literature, like other cultural productions from the global South, brings an important contribution to a new and more nuanced understanding of the Cold War as a global conflict. Bibliogr., notes, ref., sum. [Journal abstract]