A construção da identidade feminina no romance pós-apartheid Ninguém para me acompanhar, de Nadine Gordimer

Abstract

This paper discusses the relationship between Literature and History to analyze the novel that belongs to the South African post-apartheid literature None to accompany me (1994), from the writer Nadine Gordimer, in order to denounce the social and racial injustices in South Africa in the segregationist regime known as apartheid. The overall goal of this research was to investigate how the protagonist herself relates well with the black within a South Africa biased and politically unequal, where skin color says it all. She, a white woman, decides to fight and pursue the rights of blacks and looking away with these racial and ethnic conflicts. It searches still to understand some topics selected by Nadine Gordimer to fictionalizing the transition period between 1990 and 1994, when many exiles and political prisoners like Nelson Mandela returned to their country, the new political changes within the African National Congress (ANC), the first free elections – in which all blacks were allowed to vote – , the conflicts generated by these changes, urban violence and deaths in large proportions, the division of people into two main races: the black and the white and the interaction between them . It is necessary to think of the protagonist of the novel, Vera Stark, which seeks to solve the blacks´ land problems in that South Africa as apart, but at the same time builds a new female identity that changes along with the political events of the country. The themes of Gordimer‘s works include apartheid, post-apartheid, colonialism, post-colonialism, otherness, border area, diaspora, black and white, cultural heritage and diversity issues related to politics, literature and history. It´s used to think the relationship between Literature and History the theories of White, Burke, Certeau and Pesavento; for literature and postcolonial theories Bhabha, Hall, Said, Fanon and Eagleton; and gender and ethnicity Butler, Foucault, Barth, Showalter, among others.