A change of thinking: white women’s writing

Abstract

While ‘white’, like other race-based terms, is redolent of apartheid’s categories, it acknowledges the fact that the divisions forged by apartheid linger. Many white women writers have, since 2002, in both popular and more literary forms, moved towards what Krog calls “a change of watching, seeing, listening, a change of thinking”: while Krog and Marlene van Niekerk produce major works that confront in fresh ways the legacies of apartheid, many writers of a younger generation now feel free to use a range of forms and subjects. Comparison with recent black women’s writing reveals, however, that their concerns and their lives continue to diverge markedly from those of white women.