SOURCE: “Constructions of Apartheid in the International Reception of the Novels of J. M. Coetzee,” in Journal of South African Studies, Vol. 25, No. 2, June, 1999, pp. 287-301.

In the following essay, Barnett discusses critical reception of South African literature in the context of novelist J. M. Coetzee's works, noting that South African writing has often been reviewed with an abstract and moralized understanding of the nature of apartheid.

I sometimes wonder if it isn't simply that vast and wholly ideological superstructure constituted by publishing, reviewing and criticism that is forcing on me the fate of being a ‘South African novelist’.

J. M. Coetzee¹

Literature and the Moralisation of Apartheid

South Africa has been made available as an object of knowledge in particular ways. The presentation of apartheid on an international stage was culturally mediated through various discourses and institutions. This process of mediation solicited specific forms of political commitment...