SOURCE: Newman, Judie. “Jump Starts: Nadine Gordimer After Apartheid.” In Apartheid Narratives, edited by Nahem Yousaf, pp. 101-14. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001.

In the following essay, Newman offers a thematic analysis of the stories in Jump and maintains that with this volume Gordimer explores post-apartheid political and social concerns.

As apartheid has crumbled, the question which has presented itself repeatedly is whether the South African novelist has lost his or her essential subject. Can the white novelist survive the end of apartheid—or has the artist's inspiration disappeared, together with the tools previously employed? The question betrays an assumption—common, I would argue to both postcolonial and post-apartheid writing—that it can engage only with representational, realistic portrayals of an essentially political subject matter—that without Empire—or, in this particular case, without Afrikaner Nationalism—it has no independent existence of its own. The question of use value as opposed...