Writing from Johannesburg: Nadine Gordimer in the global anti-apartheid movement

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article examines how Nadine Gordimer navigated the political exigencies of being an anti-apartheid writer in Johannesburg as the multiracial literary world of the 1950s was destroyed. In the 1950s, her fiction introduced Johannesburg’s counterculture to a global audience, leading to invitations to provide an inside perspective on apartheid. The global witness role that she assumed grew more awkward as she grew more isolated at home, pushing her toward the central commitment of her political life: advancing the freedom of South African writers and readers, by speaking out against censorship and advocating for a national literature that transcended apartheid’s constraints. Drawing upon her archives at the University of the Witwatersrand and Indiana University, this article examines how Gordimer’s life in Johannesburg in an era of exile both made her career possible and made her politics awkward to enact and to write about, as her position made political purity impossible.