Resumo

NDLOVU, Thabisani. Writing a South African Pandemic Moment: Inequality and Violence in The Lockdown Collection. JLS [online]. 2022, vol.38, n.1, pp.1-16. ISSN 1753-5387.  http://dx.doi.org/10.25159/1753-5387/10415.

This article examines how the overwhelmingly dominant genre in The Lockdown Collection (2020), the personal essay, is an appropriate medium to capture the immediacy of the initial hard lockdown in South Africa because of its brevity and resonance. While the essays react to policies of virus containment, the loss and alteration of social conventions, they inevitably reveal the identity of each author and how that identity sits in the imagination of South Africanness. This appellation itself incorporates and complicates fraternities that are race and class based in a context of acute inequality and ubiquitous violence. The essays display an awareness of the strong relationship between these two aspects and writing about them appears as an antidote to fear and a desire for a better South Africa, as learnt from and suggested by the challenges of Covid-19.

Palavras-chave : South Africa; Covid-19; lockdown; creative nonfiction; inequality; violence.

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