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Podcast: New Books in Political Science
Episode: Nadine Gordimer: “Living in South Africa’s Interregnum” James Lecture, October 14, 1982
Description: 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 de...