The intention of this dissertation is to examine the writings of three South African women authors who are active in the post-apartheid era. Work by South African women writers, mainly English-speaking, has been emerging at a remarkable rate in the first 10 years of democracy. The three women authors chosen for examination here have been selected because of their different racial and social backgrounds. In different ways, they attempt to recuperate an alternative past by using a voice previously denied them through sexist and racial discrimination during apartheid South Africa. Post-apartheid writing has not received its due attention. In the main, the treatment of the works of post-apartheid authors has been slight and superficial. Unsurprisingly, the writers whose works are examined here reveal a cultural awareness of a society previously dominated by racial discrimination. However, their creative responses to the period of transition and the new social and political realities have been diverse, and this makes for revealing and enlightening analysis, criticism and comparison.

In this article I examine the representations of South African Indian women in Farida Karodia's Daughters of the Twilight and Shamim Sarif's the world unseen. My contention is that each author chooses a different mode of representation and that certain features of these representations suggest both the different relationship each author has with South Africa and the differences in the times of production of the novels. Thus while both novels are set in the 1950s, Karodia, whose site of enunciation is the 'interregnum' in the 1980s, imagines the agency of her women quite differently from Sarif, who writes from a 'post-anti-apartheid' site of enunciation in the late 1990s. I analyse and compare the relationships between characters (men and women; women and women) and look at the cultural and political significance of mixed-race figures, concentrating on uncovering the mechanisms of power and their effects. I read these against a politico-historical context of the setting and that of the times and places of production. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of Natal, Durban, 2003.

Zugl.: Konstanz, Univ., Diss., 2007