ABSTRACT
The goal of a transnational feminist reading practice is to imagine, through the vehicle of literature, cross-cultural alliances among women. Contextualizing a contemporary South African novel in its national literary tradition poses some problems for a transnational feminist reading practice, however. Zoe Wicomb troubles the distinction between art and life, but a politically committed reader will not fail to situate her textual manipulations in the literary context against which such manipulations work. The discursive fracture of the hegemonic protest narrative by Bessie Head’s insistence upon multiple subject positions and her correlation of mixed racial identity with the condition of exile will provide a literary context for reading the expatriation of Wicomb’s “Coloured” protagonist. Nadine Gordimer’s style moves from modern Western literary forms like the bildungsroman in her earlier novels to a more postmodern narrative in her later work.
