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

The Nobel Prize Winner (1991) Nadine Gordimer is a South African woman writer. She has attracted wide attention from critics because of her intense depiction of apartheid experience. Most people applaud her while some others criticize her as a colonial writer. In her last novel written in the apartheid era My Son's Story, she has portrayed a "Coloured"family involved in the South African resistance movement. By transferring the narrative power to the son of the family, Gordimer provides a new perspective of the marginalized. Through analysis of the characterization in the novel, this thesis is to testify that Gordimer demonstrates definitely her status as a postcolonial writer instead of a colonial writer. Her postcolonial status is in essence evidenced in her deconstruction of colonial binary oppositions and reconstructions of social realities. The two processes interact and reinforce each other in three respects: firstly, in Gordimer's interrogation of colonialist assumptions through representing the morbid symptoms of the apartheid society; secondly, in her subversion of the colonialist mis-representation of the "Other"image, dismantling the Othering strategy of colonialism; thirdly, in the respect she gives to the self-representation of marginal groups and consciousness transformation in promoting new modes of culture. From a postcolonial viewpoint, Gordimer subverts the white hegemony and reshapes the once marginalized culture. Her vision of a multicultural development is also very meaningful for inter-culture communications within the global context of today.