Tag
South Africa
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J. M. Coetzee’s “Disgrace” @ 25: A Roundtable
What freshly nuanced perspectives might we bring to the violent late 20th-century history Coetzee describes?
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Black Freedom Is the Seed for All Freedom
Even with colonialism and slavery ended, black life remains unfree. What will it take to go from emancipation to liberation?
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Apartheid’s Paper Trail
Why did some Black South Africans directly collaborate with their oppressors, and what was their experience like?
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When Nature Is Valued over Human Life
White South Africans used wildlife conservation to build a narrative as a race. Unfortunately, this pursuit came at the expense of Africans.
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The South According to Coetzee
Readers waiting expectantly for the third novel in J. M. Coetzee’s late trilogy, following The Childhood of Jesus and The Schooldays of Jesus, were in for a …
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The Triumph of Afrikaans Fiction
I’m reading one of the great novels of our time. I’m doing so slowly because it’s in Afrikaans, and although I learned the language for many years in South …
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Global Water Wars and the Public Good
Future global water wars are now widely predicted. In 1995, Ismail Seragaldin, vice president of the World Bank (1993–2000), first raised the specter of crisis with the …
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The South African Novel Today
Who is South Africa’s leading English novelist? Who has succeeded Alan Paton, Nadine Gordimer, and J. M. Coetzee—still with us, but hardly a South African novelist any longer? Since the arrival of democracy …
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Lie Down in the Karoo: An Antidote to the Anthropocene
Simón and David, a man and a boy, arrive by boat to find a new life. David’s father perished in an accident during the trip. David had a letter giving specifics of his mother. This was also lost. It is, then, an undocumented migrant child accompanied by an unrelated adult who arrives at the inn,…
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Into the Crud
How can a book transform how we think about the human? It is one thing to claim for oneself, as does a character in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, a dispossession so thorough that she lives with “No cards, no weapons, no property, no rights, no dignity,” prompting her father to add, “like a dog.” It…
