Winner of the 2021 ALA Book of the Year Award - Scholarship
The author uses the image of blood under the skin as a way of
understanding cultural and literary forms in contemporary South Africa.
Chapters deal with the bloodied histories of apartheid and blood as
trope for talking about change.
In this book the author argues that a younger generation of South
Africans is developing important and innovative ways of understanding
South African pasts, and that challenge the narratives that have over
the last decades been informed by notions of forgiveness and
reconciliation. The author uses the image of history-rich blood to
explore these approaches to intergenerational memory. Blood under the
skin is a carrier of embodied and gendered histories andusing this
image, the chapters revisit older archives, as well as analyse
contemporary South African cultural and literary forms.
The emphasis on blood challenges the privileged status skin has had as
explanatory category inthinking about identity, and instead emphasises
intergenerational transfer and continuity. The argument is that a
younger generation is disputing and debating the terms through which to
understand contemporary South Africa, as well as for interpreting the
legacies of the past that remain under the visible layer of skin. The
chapters each concern blood: Mandela's prison cell as laboratory for
producing bloodless freedom; the kinship relations created and resisted
in accounts of Eugene de Kock in prison; Ruth First's concern with
information leaks in her accounts of her time in prison; the first
human-to-human heart transplant and its relation to racialised attempts
to salvage whiteidentity; the #Fallist moment; Abantu book festival;
and activist scholarship and creative art works that use blood as trope
for thinking about change and continuity.
Southern Africa (South Africa, Namibia, Lesotho, Zimbabwe and
Swaziland): Wits University Press
