Nadine Gordimer''s Postcolonial Status Reflected in My Son''s Story

Criticism varies on Nadine Gordimer''s intense depiction of apartheid experience. Some criticize her as a colonial writer. Against this view, this book testifies Gordimer''s status as a postcolonial writer through an analysis of My Son''s Story, her last novel written in the apartheid era. In this novel, Gordimer transfers the narrative power to the son of a “Coloured” family so as to provide a new perspective of the marginalized. Her postcolonial stance lies in her deconstruction of colonial binary oppositions and reconstructions of social realities. Firstly, Gordimer interrogates colonialist assumptions through representing the morbid symptoms of the apartheid society; secondly, she subverts the colonialist mis-representation of the “Other” image, dismantling the Othering strategy of colonialism; thirdly, she gives her respect to the self- representation of marginal groups and consciousness transformation in promoting new modes of culture. This analysis hopes to be useful to those who are interested in postcolonial studies and esp. in the problematic stance of writers who, like Gordimer, have to live with the painful experience as in South Africa.