SOURCE: "Prospero's Complex: Race and Sex in Nadine Gordimer's Burger's Daughter," in The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Vol. XX, No. 1, 1985, pp. 81-99.

In the following essay, Newman analyzes the psychological connections that Rosa makes between race and sexuality in Burger's Daughter in relation to prevailing cultural attitudes toward each.

Nadine Gordimer has remarked that all South African novels, whatever their political intentions, involve the question of racism:

There is no country in the Western world where the creative imagination, whatever it seizes upon, finds the focus of even the most private event set in the social determination of racial laws.

There are those who have argued that the white South African novelist is automatically corrupted by a privileged position, that Gordimer's audience can only be other privileged whites, and that the products of her creative imagination are therefore intrinsically a part of a racist society. In The Conservationist...