Refractive Realisms

Literature, Culture and the South African Township

By positioning the “township” as the lens to examine the South African canon, the book undertakes a reorientation towards a black creative archive that surfaces forms of literary and cultural expression that have been overlooked.

Refractive Realisms positions the township as a lens through which to engage the South African canon, endeavouring to provide a reorientation towards a black creative archive and surfacing under-represented forms of literary and cultural expression.

The book converses with the long history of realism in black South African writing to show how the refractive realisms of the contemporary township simultaneously bear witness to precarity and articulate lively diversity. It brings together narratives that take the reader through persuasive depictions of township life and its flexible identities, the failures of post-apartheid, the possibilities that emerge from the ruins of historical injustice, the practices of commodity consumption, and the limits of race and gender discourses that align with (non)belonging to township spaces.

An incisive read on the literary and cultural forms of the twenty-first-century South African township, this book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of literary studies, identity politics, cultural studies, ethnicity and race, sociology and African Studies.

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