South African prison writing

This research project returns to and reconsiders the many representations of prison experience by political prisoners under apartheid, comparing them to new memoirs published since 2000. These include the neglected incarceration and torture of ANC prisoners in the Quatro prison in Angola and accounts of women prisoners’ prison experiences, which tended to be overwhelmed by representations by male prisoners. This project offers a comparative study of earlier accounts and those published after the end of apartheid, to examine possible differences in perspective and style between accounts published during and after the struggle for democracy. It will focus on ways in which prison as a force that shapes the subjectivity of the prisoner differs between an era in which solidarity was a felt as an intensely contested arena of personal and political action before 1995 and present refelctions. The investigation takes into account the changing historical, political contexts both during and after the apartheid years; the race, class and gender of the writers and their different forms of treatment in different prisons, and the literary forms and styles of the published memoirs, autobiographies, poetry, plays, reflections and letters and unpublished material in archives at the Mayibuye Centre (UWC) and the Nelson Mandela Foundation.