Black Consciousness affiliations in Soweto women’s life writing

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Feminist criticism engaging with South African women’s life writing including early essays by Carole Boyce Davies and Desiree Lewis, and more recent work by Gabeba Baderoon and Pumla Gqola set the terms for future work in the area. Barbara Harlow’s assessment of women’s prison narratives remains a benchmark for the field.

2 Elleke Boehmer et al. explain in a recent essay, “while BC raised awareness of unequal power relations, it was unambiguously sexist in its terms of reference, and did not consider women, in particular Black women, as having equal agency to Black men” (788). Despite this, they consider the philosophy to be relevant to a new generation of young men and women, black women in particular, “take BC ideology forwards by purposefully and deliberately gendering it to raise and bring into prominence their concerns” (799).

3 Cartobiography is not a new concept. Existing literary analyses deploying this term to describe Euro-American histories of map-making and map makers. More recently, the term has been used in connection with personal narratives and video in Story Maps of non-Western writing.

4 See for instance an excellent essay by Mbulelo Vizikhungo Mzamane, which focuses on fiction and drama, to mention that the “novel since Soweto” depicts youth activism in the form of guerilla and revolutionary acts (192).

5 IDAF’s research program began by compiling press clippings and later went on to publicize the situation of political prisoners and torture tactics used by the authorities. It published Prisoners of Apartheid, a comprehensive list of all known political prisoners in South Africa, with brief biographies of each person in custody. Under Hugh Lewin, a former political prisoner himself, the work picked up with secret trips to South Africa to photograph life under repression. Albie Sachs, Mary Benson, and Ruth First were famous political detainees who contributed their writings to the volume.

6 This essay is part of a larger project on student-led black freedom movements in the US and South Africa.

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Kanika Batra

Kanika Batra is Professor of English at Texas Tech University, where she teaches and researches postcolonial and comparative literature, transnational feminist and queer studies, and globalization studies. This essay is part of ongoing research on student-led anti-apartheid and civil rights movements in South Africa and the United States.