Staging and Undoing Apartheid’s Spatial Injustice: Heterotopias in Athol Fugard’s The Island

Spatial injustice persists in the post-apartheid decades in South Africa. Despite a lapse of fifty years after its premiere, Athol Fugard’s The Island still has contemporary resonance for its staging of the spatial injustice that South Africans encountered in the 1960s and 1970s. This article offers...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Research in African literatures Vol. 55; no. 3; pp. 169 - 186
Main Author: Qi, Yaping
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Bloomington Indiana University Press 22.09.2025
Subjects:
Actors
Apartheid
Audiences
Black people
Criticism and interpretation
Deviance
Drama
Dramatists
Empowerment
Fugard, Athol
Gated communities
Injustice
Islands
Justice
Normalization
Oppression
Playwrights
Portrayals
Post-apartheid era
Prisons
Racial segregation
Racism
Segregation
Theater
Transgression
South Africa
Robben Island
ISSN:0034-5210, 1527-2044, 1527-2044
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Spatial injustice persists in the post-apartheid decades in South Africa. Despite a lapse of fifty years after its premiere, Athol Fugard’s The Island still has contemporary resonance for its staging of the spatial injustice that South Africans encountered in the 1960s and 1970s. This article offers an alternative to the dominant thematic reading of the play, arguing that Robben Island and the prison are heterotopias of colony and deviance that work as instruments of normalization to reinforce existing racial segregation and that the improvised stage acts as a heterotopia of illusion to empower the actors to temporarily step out of their cast roles and momentarily see their own subjectivities as discursive constructs. A spatial study of The Island reveals how individuals are spatially defined in the (post)apartheid era and how the double logic of heterotopia, an interplay between normative disciplining and liberating transgression, operates in the play.
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ISSN:0034-5210
1527-2044
1527-2044
DOI:10.2979/ral.00079