The Second Sense (2007) by Nadine Gordimer highlight the possibilities that exist within gendered spaces, but also how these spaces are limited when one crosses the color bar. These works, though a small selection of Gordimer’s vast output, illustrate a range of female spaces during apartheid (and the Immorality Act) and after apartheid during different periods of Gordimer’s creativity.

Quotes

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  • The second sense whites moving in on the blacks’ country”
    • Page 269
  • to make a living any way he can
    • Page 269
  • who had no more schooling than in a small Hungarian town picked up the language easily,” and “taught how to sew in accordance with the strict requirements of a female role imposed by her grandmother,” is able to solicit clients for whom she made dresses
    • Page 270.
  • what better way to make claim to a new country
    • Page 270
  • had more women coming to be clothed by her” than she could accommodate
    • Page 270
  • As the women for whose image she sewed were inclined to take someone outside their social circle into confidences about their lives she was herself beguiled in turn to confess
    • Page 271.
  • are products of a profound sense of entitlement
    • Page 79
  • the money she was bringing in eased some of the stringencies in their life
    • Page 272.
  • Only in the prescient dimension of the imagination could I bring together what had been deliberately broken and fragmented; fit together the shapes of living experience, my own and that of others, without which a whole consciousness is not attainable. I had to be part of the transformation of my place in order for it to know me.
    • Page 130
  • the ever-constant struggles,actions,and constructions the decolonial pedagogies that fissure or crack the modern/colonial matrix of power
    • Page 76.
  • the new global economy has to be seen as a complex, overlapping, disjunctive order that cannot any longer be understood in terms of existing center-periphery models
    • Page 32,
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