In today’s episode from the Vault, we revisit Nadine Gordimer’s James Lecture on the political landscape of South Africa, presented at the New York Institute for the Humanities on October 14, 1982.

In 1982, resistance to South Africa’s apartheid was growing increasingly militant, and the state’s brutal repression heightened this tension.

In her lecture, Gordimer speaks directly to this political landscape, describing the period as an “interregnum." She discusses the crisis of white identity in South Africa, the relationship between art and politics, the urgency for an alternative political left working toward what she calls a democracy without economic and military terror.

This lecture was the basis of Gordimer’s essay “Living in the Interregnum,” published in the New York Review of Books in January of 1983.

Nadine Gordimer was a South African writer and political activist. She authored fifteen novels, including The Conversationalist, Burger’s Daughter and July’s People, over two hundred short stories, and several volumes of essays. She was awarded the Booker prize for the Conversationalist in 1974 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991. She died in 2014 at the age of 90 in Johannesburg, South Africa.

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The Conversationalist

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