Written under the Skin

Reviews / Votes

Without a doubt, this is an immensely useful book for scholars attempting to bring rigor to the work of devising new directions in South African studies and African cultural studies, more broadly. -- Bhakti Shringarpure * Journal of the African Literature Association * Carli Coetzee's Written Under the Skin is a compelling and innovative work that builds on the myriad research which focus on history and memory in South Africa. [...] This enlightening perspective to studying multidirectional memory and memory activism should, no doubt, invigorate further research in cultural and memory studies not only in South Africa, but in the whole of Africa. * African Studies Quarterly * Written under the Skin is a major contribution to literary and cultural studies. * Politique Africaine * This book is one I am going to read again and again to in order to see what reading blood can reveal. -- Bwesigye Bwa Mwesigire * Journal of the African Literature Association * Carli Coetzee has made a name for herself by showing - not telling - her readers what reconciliation after apartheid should mean. It should mean nudging South Africans away from the dangerous assumptions that negotiating the past means leaving unchallenged old patterns of privilege, that the work of translation should always benefit English and its primary speakers, and, in her latest book, that skin-deep is sufficient depth for reckoning with the past. Written under the Skin is about blood and South Africa's bloody past. It is also about the transfusion of memory across generations. The book challenges the discourse of newness that has marked South Africa since the formal end of apartheid in 1994, by showing the violence done and masked by such a discourse. Written under the Skin calls for new ways of reading South African history. It proposes protocols of care - cautious, ethical, vigilant - to guide these new ways of reading. There is in this book a moral urgency and an ethical injunction that demand our attention. We dare not ignore this book. * JACOB S. T. DLAMINI, Assistant Professor of History, Princeton University * This could be the book that weans us from our smug assertion that bodies speak to us, that we can read histories and anxieties from torso and limbs. Coetzee insists that we read what is within the body - what's beneath the skin and what flows through it - to understand the complexities of post-apartheid South Africa. Blood and feces and the whereabouts of corpses do not speak to us either, but in Coetzee's skillful reckoning they speak to each other not to construct anything so simple as a body politic but the frayed and fraught relationships that constitute how we learn about the world. * LUISE WHITE, Professor of History, University of Florida *