Apartheid and Beyond is a major contribution to the study of South African literature, offering innovative readings of writers like Coetzee, Gordimer, Fugard, Tlali, and Mda. Focusing on the relationship between place, subjectivity, and literary form, this study enhances our understanding of apartheid as a geographical form of control and of its imagined and actual transformation.

Apartheid may have met its political end five years ago and its symptoms may be in rapid remission, but there is no question that forty-two years of institutionalized social division have left deep and presumably indelible scars on the nation's cultural sensibility as well as its social past.
Rita Barnard's new book considers the political use of space (for apartheid, Afrikaans for "separateness," is nothing if not fraught with the implications of "keeping one's place"), as expressed in literature of the apartheid era. Her work joins the efforts of a pantheon of cultural theorists from
Foucault to Homi Bhabha to Edward Said in scrutinizing the intimate workings of social space, power, writing, and resistance. From the racially segregated townships to the commuter trains loaded with political, economic, and human freight, Barnard shows how everyday facets of life in South Africa
take on racial overtones of overpowering dimensions, and how fiction acts at once as a conspirator and a corrective. Drawing evidence from the works of South Africa's most celebrated contemporary writers--J.M. Coetzee, Athol Fugard, Nadine Gordimer, and others--Barnard sets up a powerful theory that
stresses the centrality of physical place to literary, political, and imaginative dominions.

The breadth and subtleties of Barnard's analysis make Apartheid and Beyond an important study of major South African literary figures