Reading through a Cold War Lens: Apartheid-Era Literature and the Global Conflict

This article argues that apartheid-era literature was shaped by the Cold War cultural and political landscape. With genres and narrative structures shared with Western literary traditions (such as spy fiction) or Eastern Bloc literatures (such as socialist realism), apartheid-era literature nonetheless retained its local concerns and features. Starting from three initial topoi (the border as a real and mental topography, political and individual secrets, and narratives of revolution and transformation), this article contends that South African literature, like other cultural productions from the global South, brings an important contribution to a new and more nuanced understanding of the Cold War as a global conflict.