The "New South African Woman" in Angela Makholwa's crime fiction in a transnational feminist context

Abstract

The article reads two crime fiction novels by Angela Makholwa, the bestselling South African novelist, as radical feminist novels that respond to an extremely high rate of violence against women in contemporary South Africa. It is argued that Makholwa's articulations of female desire rewrite South African post-apartheid discourses about the nation from a black female perspective. The trope of the New South African Woman in these texts is analyzed as an expression of 21st-century African feminism that rejects the culture of violent masculinity as well as traditional discourses about women. In comparing it with 1st-wave feminism's New Woman ideology as it was manifested in American and European fin-de-siècle contexts, it is seen as a transnational feminist phenomenon that responds to nationalism's exclusion of women from the nation.