Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements and note on references
- South Africa, 1930–1996: a chronology
- Maps
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Interrogating silence: new possibilities faced by South African literature
- 3 I am dead: you cannot read: André Brink's On the Contrary
- 4 Endings and new beginning: South African fiction in transition
- 5 The post-apartheid sublime: rediscovering the extraordinary
- 6 Postmodernism and black writing in South Africa
- 7 Shame and identity: the case of the coloured in South Africa
- 8 A man's world: South African gay writing and the State of Emergency
- 9 The final safari: on nature, myth, and the literature of the Emergency
- 10 Interview
- 11 Speech and silence in the fictions of J.M.Coetzee
- 12 ‘Dialogue’ and ‘fulfilment’ in J.M. Coetzee's Age of Iron
- 13 Interview
- 14 Inside out: Jeremy Cronin's lyrical politics
- 15 Spinning out the present: narrative, gender, and the politics of South African theatre
- 16 South African theatre in the United States: the allure of the familiar and of the exotic
- Position papers
- Select bibliography: South African literary writing in English, 1970–1995
- Index
8 - A man's world: South African gay writing and the State of Emergency
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 July 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements and note on references
- South Africa, 1930–1996: a chronology
- Maps
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Interrogating silence: new possibilities faced by South African literature
- 3 I am dead: you cannot read: André Brink's On the Contrary
- 4 Endings and new beginning: South African fiction in transition
- 5 The post-apartheid sublime: rediscovering the extraordinary
- 6 Postmodernism and black writing in South Africa
- 7 Shame and identity: the case of the coloured in South Africa
- 8 A man's world: South African gay writing and the State of Emergency
- 9 The final safari: on nature, myth, and the literature of the Emergency
- 10 Interview
- 11 Speech and silence in the fictions of J.M.Coetzee
- 12 ‘Dialogue’ and ‘fulfilment’ in J.M. Coetzee's Age of Iron
- 13 Interview
- 14 Inside out: Jeremy Cronin's lyrical politics
- 15 Spinning out the present: narrative, gender, and the politics of South African theatre
- 16 South African theatre in the United States: the allure of the familiar and of the exotic
- Position papers
- Select bibliography: South African literary writing in English, 1970–1995
- Index
Summary
Traditionally, gay writing has found its subject and its political agenda in the perceived plight of the gay person in a world indifferent or hostile to homosexual desire. E. M. Forster's Maurice, resolutely confronting the responsibility, the penalty, and the reward for loving his own kind, was declaring a secession from ‘normal’ relations that has remained implicit in much gay writing:
He knew what the call was, and what his answer must be. They must live outside class, without relations or money; they must work and stick to each other till death. But England belonged to them. That, besides companionship, was their reward. Her air and sky were theirs, not the timorous millions' who own stuffy little boxes, but never their own souls.
(Maurice, 208–9)Though, obviously, much has changed since poor Maurice attempted to have himself ‘cured’ by hypnosis, his sense of being outnumbered and outlawed would be recognizable to many of the protagonists of more recent gay novels and stories. That ‘happier year’ to which Forster dedicated his novel in 1914 has been, in this respect, elusive. In spite of, and perhaps partly because of, much more liberal official attitudes, prejudice and intolerance persist.
In South Africa, of course, prejudice and intolerance have long been much more visible as institutionalized racism than as homophobia; but even here, gay literature frequently records the experience of discrimination and oppression.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Writing South AfricaLiterature, Apartheid, and Democracy, 1970–1995, pp. 108 - 122Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1998
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