Paper short abstract:

The black woman writers’ imagination of the shebeen rewrites the domestic, public and aesthetic spaces of apartheid, illuminating the shebeen as a heterotopic space of black women’s liberation situated amidst the unrelenting oppressive forces of the apartheid era.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines the way in which black women writers reconstruct the landscape of apartheid South Africa through their work, specifically in their imagination and portrayal of shebeens – illegal taverns that operated in black women’s homes. As black women’s work was made obsolete during apartheid, due to restrictive publication acts until the late 1980s in South Africa, the global comprehension of black women’s lives and experiences during apartheid was restricted. This lack of literary circulation of black women’s writing, in addition to the political disavowal of their humanity, obscured the presence of the black woman’s body in apartheid society. Through the analysis of Fatima Dike’s play, So What’s New?; Miriam Tlali’s auto fictional short story, “Gone are Those Days”; and Ellen Kuzwayo’s autobiography, Call Me Woman, I examine how the most marginalised individuals in apartheid South Africa reimagined, rewrote and reconfigured the landscape of their nation, through their written words, to make themselves visible in the historiography of apartheid. This paper argues that the black woman writers’ imagination of the space of the shebeen rewrites the domestic, public and aesthetic spaces of apartheid, illuminating the shebeen as a heterotopic space of black women’s liberation which opposes the unrelenting intersectional oppressive forces of the apartheid era.