… a finger-on-the-pulse report from the cultural frontline of contemporary South Africa. Elegantly and lucidly written, it offers a penetrating and unique analysis of the complex and paradoxical forms of culture emerging in South Africa now. —Isabel Hofmeyr, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.

This original book is a much needed and far reaching exploration of post-apartheid South African life worlds. Entanglement aims to capture the contradictory mixture of innovation and inertia, of loss, violence and xenophobia as well as experimentation and desegregation, which characterises the present. The author explores the concept of entanglement in relation to readings of literature, new media forms and painting. In the process, she moves away from a persistent apartheid optic, drawing on ideas of sameness and difference, and their limits, in order to elicit ways of living and imagining that are just starting to take shape and for which we might not yet have a name.

In the background of her investigations lies a preoccupation with a future-oriented politics, one that builds on largely unexplored terrains of mutuality while being attentive to a historical experience of confrontation and injury.

Sarah Nuttall is Associate Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER), at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Nuttall is the 2008 winner of the Wits University Research Committee Publication Award, which is made each year to enable outstanding research by a member of the university to be published.

Table of contents

• Chapter 1. Entanglement
• Chapter 2. Literary City
• Chapter 3. Secrets and Lies
• Chapter 4. Surface and Underneath
• Chapter 5. Self-Styling
• Chapter 6. Girl Bodies

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