The topics of land tenure, contested geographical spaces, and ‘place’, broadly defined, permeate much of South African historiography. Over the past twenty years, environmental histories in particular have called further attention to the centrality of these concepts in the historian and cultural critic's mind. Naturally, such themes and variations pervade the nation's literature, but critical analyses to date have not engaged these socio-spatial dynamics sufficiently. Rita Barnard's Apartheid and Beyond seeks to address the shortage of literature on the ‘politics of place’ and to serve as ‘an account of the sociospatial aspects of the transition from apartheid to democracy’ (9).

Barnard's timely study focuses principally on works by J. M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Athol Fugard, Miriam Tlali and Zakes Mda. These form but the core of her vast and erudite study on the ‘cultural and political significance of certain key places, including the farm, the white suburban home, the black township, the shack settlement, and the theatre, in the light of theoretical work on the interconnections between spatial relations, systems of power, and ideological and generic forms’ (3). The focus is so broad – and the potential case studies so numerous and tantalisingly suitable – that Barnard surrenders her Apartheid and Beyond to readers as a methodologically ‘eclectic’ study, its essays ‘free-standing but nevertheless interconnected’ (9).

With a topic as diverse and potentially unwieldy, such an approach is nearly inevitable. The book's chapters do not push forward a singular thesis but instead serve as illuminating meditations on the importance of place and space in a society with a past of ‘separate-ness’. The analysis covers a vast amount of territory. For example, Barnard plumbs Coetzee's Disgrace, among other novels, to discuss his ‘dream topographies’ and the post-apartheid pastoral; she examines geographical dislocation and revolution in Gordimer's July's People and The Conservationist; and, in a particularly insightful chapter, she employs Una Chaudhuri's concept of the ‘geography of drama’ in her readings of Athol Fugard's Tsotsi and Boesman and Lena.

The breadth and subtleties of Barnard's analysis make Apartheid and Beyond an important study of major South African literary figures, as she utilises a broad range of literary theory to examine well-known works in a new perspective. The thematic approach of socio-spatial relationships allows for her expansive study, but readers may be left wishing the chapters had been tied together more tightly beneath a central thesis. And yet, because the book reveals multiple fertile grounds for the study of place, and because of the topical importance to South African history and literature, Apartheid and Beyond should remain a significant contribution to literary criticism. This book's enduring value, I may venture, will be the strong foundation it sets for spatial analyses in literature and the forthcoming works it may inspire.