Fantasy States: Nationalism, Intimacy, and Transgression in South African Women’s Political Memoirs

Abstract

This article reads a set of South African women’s political memoirs as both propaganda pieces and fantasy texts. Inspired by Joan W. Scott’s recent explorations of feminist fantasy, the article draws attention to a set of scenes that recur across diverse political memoirs: scenes of interracial physical and domestic intimacy and scenes of collective national voyaging. Reading these depictions as fantasies, this article argues, lets us understand these women memoirists as propagandists for a national liberation cause. In their texts, these women espouse a particular and gendered nationalism that insists on public and private intimacy as a key component of a (fantasized) free South Africa, even as they acknowledge the unease inherent in seeking out these intimacies. This reading disrupts scholarly accounts that have tended to marginalize women as contributors to nationalist discourses, and it enables a deeper analysis of the tensions of race and interracial intimacy that beset the antiapartheid movement.