Democracy at Home in South Africa: Family Fictions and Transitional Culture [Hardcover]

Focusing on aesthetic figuration diverse home spaces, modes of domestic life, and family histories, this book argues that depicting democracy as it unfolds literally at home presents a compelling portrait of the intimate and everyday aspects of change that can be overlooked by a focus on structural concerns in South Africa.

Bystrom is a master synthesizer who lucidly lays out complex debates and compellingly places her own concerns in their context. The debates on democracy place this study squarely in the humanistic discussion that has evolved around human rights in the last ten years, and where the case of South Africa is a central paradigm. Bystrom's prose is clear and subtle at the same time, and her enormous range of reference will be an invaluable tool for both experts in the field and other audiences who may want to enter the field. - Eleni Coundouriotis, University of Connecticut, USA

An outstanding intellectual meditation on transitional culture in South Africa's first fifteen years of democracy. Bystrom is right: the imaginative acts of the extended transition are valuable to us now, as we enter an altogether darker period of historical reckoning and reflection - and look for the forming swells of a future we can recognize. - Sarah Nuttall, author of Entanglement: Literary and Cultural Reflections on Post-apartheid

Democracy at Home in South Africa is a magnificent and unmatched study of the micro-politics of transition and democratic experiment in South Africa and the aesthetic traditions that have emerged to plot the nation beyond the entanglements of historical trauma, race, and nationalism. Working across the spectrum of South African literature and art after apartheid, Bystrom provides us with one of the best explorations of the role of the family and home in the South African democratic experiment. - Simon Gikandi, Professor, English, Princeton University, USA