Contemporary Literary Criticism | Post-apartheid Literature - Margaret Lenta (essay date October 1998)

Margaret Lenta (essay date October 1998)

SOURCE: Lenta, Margaret. “Goodbye Lena, Goodbye Poppie: Post-Apartheid Black Women's Writing.” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 29, no. 4 (October 1998): 101-18.

[In the following essay, Lenta describes how the works of black women writers in post-apartheid South Africa have evolved from stories primarily told through an intermediary to stories told by the protagonists themselves.]

“For me, the question ‘Who should speak?’ is less crucial than ‘Who will listen?’” says Gayatri Spivak, in a discussion of the rights of the oppressed to produce literary texts (59). Both questions are crucial for South Africa as a post-Apartheid country, where the rights and wrongs of “speaking for,” as opposed to attending to the efforts of the oppressed to speak, have in the past been obscured by the insistence of the authorities that we listen only to members of our own group....

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