Paperback with 332 pages in good secondhand condition.

Though the years of democratic transition in South Africa, 1990-95, have seen rapid changes in political and intellectual life, these years have also been witness to the after-effects of a demented national life under apartheid. While politicians scurried about at the World Trade Centre, bartering rights for privileges, ordinary people and the country's institutions struggled to develop new modes of feeling and action. The country's poets also vigorously sought a bigger, less embattled space in which to work the perceived new realities into changing forms of expression. While it may be true to say that inspiring transformations have indeed occurred, it is also trae that no one in South Africa escaped apartheid and its deep scarring of cultural lifeneither liberals nor radicals, nor people of any other inclination. For many decades, supposedly liberal departments of English silently colluded with the "regime" by firmly repressing a full, open representation of the nation's literary life on their syllabuses, preferring instead to maintain narrowly Anglocentric and politically "neutral" curricula, while so-called liberal newspapers ran "Africa" editions for black readers, full of crudely sensationalized stories depicting what they imagined was the "township life" they never bothered to discover for themselves. Even the progressive, left-wing intelligentsia who promoted the cultural boycott of the 1980s, and those of us who imagined we were working from within to undermine the system, somehow cooperated in the construction of a suffocating intellectual life defined by the most cramping of dualisms.