Overview

Winner of the 2021 ALA Book of the Year Award - Scholarship The author uses the image of blood under the skin as a way of understanding cultural and literary forms in contemporary South Africa. Chapters deal with the bloodied histories of apartheid and blood as trope for talking about change. In this book the author argues that a younger generation of South Africans is developing important and innovative ways of understanding South African pasts, and that challenge the narratives that have over the last decades been informed by notions of forgiveness and reconciliation. The author uses the image of history-rich blood to explore these approaches to intergenerational memory. Blood under the skin is a carrier of embodied and gendered histories andusing this image, the chapters revisit older archives, as well as analyse contemporary South African cultural and literary forms. The emphasis on blood challenges the privileged status skin has had as explanatory category inthinking about identity, and instead emphasises intergenerational transfer and continuity. The argument is that a younger generation is disputing and debating the terms through which to understand contemporary South Africa, as well as for interpreting the legacies of the past that remain under the visible layer of skin. The chapters each concern blood: Mandela's prison cell as laboratory for producing bloodless freedom; the kinship relations created and resisted in accounts of Eugene de Kock in prison; Ruth First's concern with information leaks in her accounts of her time in prison; the first human-to-human heart transplant and its relation to racialised attempts to salvage whiteidentity; the #Fallist moment; Abantu book festival; and activist scholarship and creative art works that use blood as trope for thinking about change and continuity. Southern Africa (South Africa, Namibia, Lesotho, Zimbabwe and Swaziland): Wits University Press

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9781847013248

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Reviews

Without a doubt, this is an immensely useful book for scholars attempting to bring rigor to the work of devising new directions in South African studies and African cultural studies, more broadly. -- Bhakti Shringarpure * Journal of the African Literature Association * Carli Coetzee's Written Under the Skin is a compelling and innovative work that builds on the myriad research which focus on history and memory in South Africa. [...] This enlightening perspective to studying multidirectional memory and memory activism should, no doubt, invigorate further research in cultural and memory studies not only in South Africa, but in the whole of Africa. * African Studies Quarterly * Written under the Skin is a major contribution to literary and cultural studies. * Politique Africaine * This book is one I am going to read again and again to in order to see what reading blood can reveal. -- Bwesigye Bwa Mwesigire * Journal of the African Literature Association * Carli Coetzee has made a name for herself by showing - not telling - her readers what reconciliation after apartheid should mean. It should mean nudging South Africans away from the dangerous assumptions that negotiating the past means leaving unchallenged old patterns of privilege, that the work of translation should always benefit English and its primary speakers, and, in her latest book, that skin-deep is sufficient depth for reckoning with the past. Written under the Skin is about blood and South Africa's bloody past. It is also about the transfusion of memory across generations. The book challenges the discourse of newness that has marked South Africa since the formal end of apartheid in 1994, by showing the violence done and masked by such a discourse. Written under the Skin calls for new ways of reading South African history. It proposes protocols of care - cautious, ethical, vigilant - to guide these new ways of reading. There is in this book a moral urgency and an ethical injunction that demand our attention. We dare not ignore this book. * JACOB S. T. DLAMINI, Assistant Professor of History, Princeton University * This could be the book that weans us from our smug assertion that bodies speak to us, that we can read histories and anxieties from torso and limbs. Coetzee insists that we read what is within the body - what's beneath the skin and what flows through it - to understand the complexities of post-apartheid South Africa. Blood and feces and the whereabouts of corpses do not speak to us either, but in Coetzee's skillful reckoning they speak to each other not to construct anything so simple as a body politic but the frayed and fraught relationships that constitute how we learn about the world. * LUISE WHITE, Professor of History, University of Florida *

Without a doubt, this is an immensely useful book for scholars attempting to bring rigor to the work of devising new directions in South African studies and African cultural studies, more broadly. -- Bhakti Shringarpure * Journal of the African Literature Association * Carli Coetzee's Written Under the Skin is a compelling and innovative work that builds on the myriad research which focus on history and memory in South Africa. [...] This enlightening perspective to studying multidirectional memory and memory activism should, no doubt, invigorate further research in cultural and memory studies not only in South Africa, but in the whole of Africa. * African Studies Quarterly * This could be the book that weans us from our smug assertion that bodies speak to us, that we can read histories and anxieties from torso and limbs. Coetzee insists that we read what is within the body - what's beneath the skin and what flows through it - to understand the complexities of post-apartheid South Africa. Blood and feces and the whereabouts of corpses do not speak to us either, but in Coetzee's skillful reckoning they speak to each other not to construct anything so simple as a body politic but the frayed and fraught relationships that constitute how we learn about the world. * LUISE WHITE, Professor of History, University of Florida * This book is one I am going to read again and again to in order to see what reading blood can reveal. -- Bwesigye Bwa Mwesigire * Journal of the African Literature Association * Carli Coetzee has made a name for herself by showing - not telling - her readers what reconciliation after apartheid should mean. It should mean nudging South Africans away from the dangerous assumptions that negotiating the past means leaving unchallenged old patterns of privilege, that the work of translation should always benefit English and its primary speakers, and, in her latest book, that skin-deep is sufficient depth for reckoning with the past. Written under the Skin is about blood and South Africa's bloody past. It is also about the transfusion of memory across generations. The book challenges the discourse of newness that has marked South Africa since the formal end of apartheid in 1994, by showing the violence done and masked by such a discourse. Written under the Skin calls for new ways of reading South African history. It proposes protocols of care - cautious, ethical, vigilant - to guide these new ways of reading. There is in this book a moral urgency and an ethical injunction that demand our attention. We dare not ignore this book. * JACOB S. T. DLAMINI, Assistant Professor of History, Princeton University *

Author Information

Carli Coetzee is Editor of the Journal of African Cultural Studies. Her publications include: Accented Futures: Language Activism and the Ending of Apartheid (Wits University Press, 2013) and the edited collection Afropolitanism: Reboot (Routledge, 2017). She co-edited The Handbook of African Literature (Routledge, 2019) with Moradewun Adejunmobi and Negotiating the Past: The Making of Memory in South Africa(Oxford University Press, 1998) with Sarah Nuttall.

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