Black and Present: A review of Barbara Boswellâs And Wrote My Story Anyway
By Opinion
Mandisa Haarhoff
In her first academic book, And Wrote My Story Anyway, published 2020 by Wits Press, Barbara Boswell animates significant contributions to feminist thought made by Black South African women writers.
These writers have often been undermined by critics such as Lewis Nkosi as mere stenographers concerned with motherhood, naïve reportage on apartheid horrors, and autobiography. Boswell challenges this reduction of Black womenâs intellectual labour and articulates the literary topography their works make possible, the theoretical grammar of their narratives, and the aesthetic inventions of their imagined world.