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Nadine Gordimer’s delicate, perceptive, and oftentimes idiosyncratic
treatment of controversial issues has received a lot of critical enquiry.
Scant attention, however, has been paid to how Gordimer’s critical
appraisal of apartheid policies emerges from her attempt to concretely
embody African languages, discourses, and cultures in her fiction. This
essay, therefore, revisits Gordimer’s apartheid-era fiction to examine how
the representation of a range of discourses in Gordimer’s fiction
constitutes a means through which she appraises apartheid power relations
and the effects of divisive policies. The paper argues that Gordimer’s
treatise on apartheid and its divisive policies is manifested in her attempt
to embody African discourses in her apartheid-era fiction. In this paper, I
rely on Foucault’s definition of discourse as “ways of constituting
knowledge, together with the social practices, forms of subjectivity and
power relations which inhere in such knowledges and relations between
them . . . [d]iscourses [that] are more than ways of thinking and producing
meaning. . . . They constitute the ‘nature’ of the body, unconscious and
conscious mind and emotional life of the subjects they seek to govern”
(qtd. in Weedon 108). They are also “a form of power that circulates in the
social field and can attach to strategies of domination as well as those of
resistance” (qtd. in Diamond and Quinby 185). Both of these definitions
refer to discourse not as an innocent act, but one that conditions subjects
in their social, cultural and economic interactions. |
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