And Wrote My Story Anyway: Black South African women’s novels as feminism: Barbara Boswell.

ISBN: 9781776146185

 ‎ Wits University Press: 1 September 2020

Paperback: 264 pages

Part literary history, part feminist historiography, Barbara Boswell’s And Wrote My Story Anyway: Black South African Women’s Novels as Feminism examines ten novels and places them in a conversation with each other. The result is an arc of feminist criticism speaking forcefully to racist, white-dominated, patriarchal power.

Part literary history, part feminist historiography And Wrote My Story Anyway: Black South African Women’s Novels as Feminism critically examines influential novels by eminent black female writers.
Studying these writers’ key engagements with nationalism, race and gender during apartheid and the transition to democracy, Barbara Boswell traces the ways in which black women’s fiction interrogates narrow ideas of nationalism. She examines who is included and excluded, while producing alternative visions for a more just South African society.
This is an erudite analysis of ten well-known South African writers, spanning the apartheid and post-apartheid era: Miriam Tlali, Lauretta Ngcobo, Farida Karodia, Agnes Sam, Sindiwe Magona, Zoë Wicomb, Rayda Jacobs, Yvette Christiansë, Kagiso Lesego Molope and Zukiswa Wanner. Boswell argues that black women’s fiction could and should be read as a subversive site of knowledge production.
Reading their fiction as theory, these writers’ works are placed in sustained conversation with each other, producing an arc of feminist criticism that speaks forcefully back to the abuse of a racist, white-dominated, patriarchal power.