ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes three South African novels in the context of post-apartheid debates on toxic masculinities, nationalism, and the New South African Woman. It argues that the novels by Angela Makholwa and Kopano Matlwa rewrite South African post-apartheid discourses about the nation from a black female perspective to reject the culture of violent masculinity as well as traditional discourses about women by appealing to universal human rights. The trope of the New South African Woman is read as an analogy to first-wave feminism’s New Woman ideology and as a transnational feminist phenomenon.
