Although Nadine Gordimer did not consider herself to be a particularly political person, she found that the place she lived in required her to be so. During her lifetime the Nationalist Party in South Africa came to power and enforced the system of apartheid, a political and legal regime that stripped rights from people of color and placed whites at the top of society. Gordimer asserted that no one could live in South Africa and not be involved in politics. She opposed apartheid, which was evident from her writings, including "Once upon a Time." Some of her books were banned because they exposed the injustice of the government. Before apartheid ended in 1991, Gordimer had been a secret member of the National African Congress. When Nelson Mandela was released from prison, Gordimer publicly "paid her dues in person and got a party card" (New York Times). After that, she embraced other political causes, including trying to stop the spread of AIDS in Africa and writing in opposition to the South African "secrecy law." You can read an article she wrote about the Secrecy Bill below.
In 1991 when Gordimer received the Nobel Prize in Literature, the committee noted that she didn't allow her political activism to "encroach upon her writings." So although she felt thrust into the political world, Gordimer was first and foremost a writer, not a political person.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2012/05/24/south-africa-new-threat-freedom/?pagination=false
Tuesday, January 22, 2013
What is Gordimer's political point of view?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Summarize the major research findings of "Toward an experimental ecology of human development."
Based on findings of prior research, the author, Bronfenbrenner proposes that methods for natural observation research have been applied in ...
-
One way to support this thesis is to explain how these great men changed the world. Indeed, Alexander the Great (356–323 BC) was the quintes...
-
Polysyndeton refers to using several conjunctions in a row to achieve a dramatic effect. That can be seen in this sentence about the child: ...
-
Both boys are very charismatic and use their charisma to persuade others to follow them. The key difference of course is that Ralph uses his...
-
At the most basic level, thunderstorms and blizzards are specific weather phenomena that occur most frequently within particular seasonal cl...
-
Equation of a tangent line to the graph of function f at point (x_0,y_0) is given by y=y_0+f'(x_0)(x-x_0). The first step to finding eq...
-
Population policy is any kind of government policy that is designed to somehow regulate or control the rate of population growth. It include...
-
Gulliver cooperates with the Lilliputians because he is so interested in them. He could, obviously, squash them underfoot, but he seems to b...
No comments:
Post a Comment