Fellowship: Rocca Dissertation
Fellowship Year: 2025
Project Theme/Title: Racialized Political Consciousness and The Historical Protest Novel: Reading South African Women’s Fiction, 1960-1980
Abstract: Blackness has always been a politically contingent identity category. In 1968, South Africa’s student-led Black Consciousness Movement radically rearticulated the significance of Blackness, forever altering political consciousness and subjectivity in the multi-racial anti-apartheid movement. This comparative study considers how three South
African women authors from different racial classifications negotiated these shifts in their
1960s and 1970s novels. Through distinctive literary uses of space and speech, Bessie
Head (biracial, classified Coloured), Miriam Tlali (Black), and Nadine Gordimer (White),
foregrounded diverging concerns in response to the same political moment. Its multiperspectival methodology for analyzing women’s racialized anti-apartheid subjectivity offers an original contribution to South African literary studies and its history of consciousness, during a complex, underexplored period. Demonstrating how these writers
integrate elements of the instrumentalist “protest novel” and the representational
“historical novel,” the study challenges an implicit disciplinary divide between these
categories, advocating a critical shift in African literary studies.
Job title:
PhD Candidate
Department:
English
Research interests:
Topics
