'This issue reflects exciting new work across genres and political contexts and brings together articles that focus on a variety of forms through which experiences are creatively imagined, such as testimony, allegory, magic, myth and orature. Much of this issue is devoted to contemporary Africa and in particular to shared concerns over the function of the historical record. The work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, for example, is revealed as unfinished business as are the enduring political and racial structures of South Africa’s imperial past.' (Introduction)
'The adjectives often used to describe J.M. Coetzee’s fiction – sparse, taut, stark, lean – have become so familiar to readers and critics as to border on cliché. Less frequent are critical discussions that parse out the linguistic and rhetorical manoeuvres Coetzee uses to hone such economical yet affecting prose. Jarad Zimbler’s analysis attempts to place Coetzee’s style within a broader South African literary context, while also encouraging the field of postcolonial studies to embrace stylistic analysis as a way to move beyond cultural critique and inspire a “re-orientation of postcolonial criticism towards questions of literary technique” (24).' (Introduction)
