The Gothic genre has become extremely popular in South Africa since apartheid. Joseph-Vilai maintains that the eerie and disturbing qualities of Gothic writing express the anxieties of a troubled society, and she makes a strong case... Especially interesting is the author's discussion of the Gothic transformation of a keystone of South African white writing, the "farm novel." The last and most original chapter, "Non-Places," looks at science fiction and dystopian writing. Joseph-Vilain concedes that she is not a South African, but points out that an outsider can have special insights. She interrogates the explosively problematic term "white" with insight, and she skillfully balances theory and close reading. Including an extensive bibliography, helpful notes, and a thorough index, this will be an useful resource for those interested in South African writing. Recommended for upper-division undergraduates through faculty.
— Choice Reviews
This is a most timely and elucidating work, lucid in exposition and wide ranging in its target texts as well as its theoretical underpinning. The book reads informatively even to somebody not in the first instance engaged by the Gothic as a genre or temper, and, as I have attempted to highlight, its wider import is in the critical study and exposition of South African landscapes. It is up to date, introduces the reader to contemporary white and English (and, obliquely, Afrikaans) authors. It grows out of the pioneering White Writing (1988) of Coetzee, without falling into its shadow. And its author makes a persuasive and closely argued case for the impress of the
Gothic upon recent literary production in South Africa.
— French Studies in Southern Africa
A welcome contribution to the scholarship devoted to South African literary studies, Post-Apartheid Gothic shows how a postcolonial dialogue with the Gothic in the new “Rainbow Nation” proves extremely suggestive. The emergence of this new literary form, which Joseph-Vilain labels “post-apartheid gothic,” brings her study into dialogue with contemporary investigations on the Gothic as a “global” mode capable of traveling through time and space and of adapting to different cultures. At the same time, it reflects particular, local preoccupations in South Africa, responding to the need felt by white writers for coming to terms with an outrageous history of oppression and redefining a new, problematic subjectivity. [The] book succeeds in emphasizing how white anxieties are staged through a broadening of textual boundaries and a radical experimentation in generic practice, using Gothic motifs to creatively map both physical and psychological territories.
— Postcolonial Literatures and Arts