On South Africa's Blacks' Cultural Identity

Nadine Gordimer, a modern South Africa Jewish writer writing in English, won the Nobel Prize of Literature in 1991. She is an outstanding female writer after Nelly·Sachs who got the prize in 1966. The works of Nadine Gordimer are written in an incisive style with strong political overtones. The purpose of her works is to lash the government implementation of South African white apartheid. Her works show the social deformity by racial system and the colored race suffering and their distorted humanity. Gordimer declared to the world that a conscience writer "it is nothing but a revolutionary stance" in such abnormal society with her own creative practice. As the Nobel Prize word had said, the literature of Gordimer offered profound wit to the socio-historical process of South Africa, and helped the development of this process. Here I take her representative July's People to investigate the historic building and subversiveness of status of black culture and the idea of the post-racial era to the coexistence of cultural identity in South Africa black and white.This article is made up of three parts, including "introduction", "text" and "conclusion".At the beginning, it introduce Gordimer's life and creation, carding the domestic translation of her work, and the researches of domestic and foreign, in order to present the problems and its meaning of this paper. In the First Chapter, it discusses how the South Africa Negro culture identity was regarded as "the other" by the combination of "the other" theory and the special historical situation in South Africa. In the Second Chapter, it combines with the text to analyze that the Negro subverts his own "otherness" identity and remodels the cultural identity when the racial system is about to corrupt. In the third Chapter, it analyzes Gordimer's idea of her own cultural identity construction and her black and white cultures coexisting for South Africa. In conclusion, We can see the profound realistic color in Gordimer's July's People and her conception about black and white cultures coexisting in South Africa has a very important practical significance.