Brenna Munro’s South Africa and the Dream of Love To Come: Queer Sexuality and the Struggle for Freedom examines representation of same-sex sexuality in South African literary and cultural texts. The book develops riveting and astoundingly eloquent, pioneering queer readings of South African texts, which begin to redefine and extend what constitutes “queer” and the possible work of queer epistemology from a postcolonial perspective. The impulse for the project, Munro explains in her preface, was her curiosity about “how South Africans managed to forge a gay-friendly, radically plural democracy” (xxxiii). Munro’s commitment to exploring this question is evidenced by her meticulous, thoughtful, and impressive marshalling of wide-ranging scholarship but also, as her acknowledgements reveal, her intensive research in South Africa.

The book ranges from the period of the intensification of the struggle against apartheid in 1960s, through the period of transition to democracy, and into the posttransition period up until 2010. The roughly chronological ordering of the texts is a function of the author’s insistence on locating her analysis in specific histories. Taking her cue from Rita Barnard’s idea of “dream topographies” (in Apartheid and Beyond, Oxford, 2006)—of key social spaces where power, ideology, and form interconnect and from which the imagined new emerges—Munro selects her texts from the space of the prison, the border, the city, the village, and the township. Her texts are thus not only carefully and deliberately selected, and astounding in their sheer number and the range of genres represented, but also continually brought into unpredictable conversation with one another both within and between the organizing categories. At a time in South African queer studies in which we find an interesting trend toward greater specificity of focus—on, for example, gay male narratives (Robin Malan and Ashraf Johaardien, eds., Yes, I Am! [2010]) or rural gay male lives (Graeme Reid, How to Be a Real Gay [2013]), or trans stories (Ruth Morgan, Charl Marais, & Joy Rosemary Wellbeloved, eds., Trans: Transgender Life Stories from South Africa [2010]), or bisexuality (Cheryl Stobie, Somewhere in the Double Rainbow [2007]), or sexuality and religion (Pepe Hendricks, ed. Hijab: Queer Muslim Lives [2009]), or representation of the female body (Desiree Lewis, ed., “Scripted Bodies,” Social Dynamics 37 [2], 2011)—Munro’s book invites us to also range widely and think dialogically across time, space, and category, as does the recent compilation by Sylvia Tamale, African Sexualities (Pambazuka Books, 2011).

In the first chapter, “Antiapartheid Prison Writing,” Munro focuses in particular on Dennis Brutus’s Letters to Martha, and Other Poems from a South African Prison (1968); D. M. Zwelonke’s novel Robben Island (1973); Moses Dlamini’s memoir Hell-Hole Robben Island: Reminiscences of a Political Prisoner (1984); Natoo Babenia’s Memoirs of a Saboteur: Reflections of My Political Activity in India and South Africa (1995); and Breyten Breytenbach’s The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist (1984). In the chapter titled “Gay Prison Revisions” she examines Jerome Morrison’s short story “Tomorrow” (1993); Zackie Achmat’s confessional article “‘Immoral Practices’ and ‘Unnatural Vice’ in South African Prisons and Compounds, 1890–1920” (Social Dynamics 19 [2], 1993); Simon Nkoli’s autobiographical “Wardrobes: Coming Out as a Black Gay Activist in South Africa” (in Mark Gevisser and Edwin Cameron, eds., Defiant Desire: Gay and Lesbian Lives in South Africa, 1995); Clive van den Berg’s art installation Men Loving: Memorials without Facts (1996); Robert Coleman’s play Your Loving Simon (2003); John Greyson and Jack Lewis’s film Proteus (2003); Mandla Langa’s The Memory of Stones (2000); and the television show Yizo Yizo.

In the chapter titled “Border Writing” Munro examines Koos Prinsloo’s “Promise You’ll Tell No-One” (1987; in Mark Gevisser and Edwin Cameron, eds., Defiant Desire: Gay and Lesbian Lives in South Africa, 1995); Damon Galgut’s The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs (1991); and André Carl van der Merwe’s Moffie (2006). In a section on the apartheid-era city and village she brings together Richard Rive’s novel “Buckingham Palace”, District Six (1986); Rozena Maart’s Rosa’s District Six (2004); and Bessie Head’s A Question of Power (1974). In the section on postapartheid nationhood she scrutinizes Nadine Gordimer’s None to Accompany Me (1994) and The House Gun (1998); J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999); and public “familial” discourse around the father figure Nelson Mandela, the “mother of the nation” Winnie Madikela Mandela, queer “daughter” Brenda Fassie, and the “tannie of the nation” Pieter-Dirk Uys. Finally, in a section on the township and queer citizenship Munro looks at K. Sello Duiker’s novels Thirteen Cents (2000) and The Quiet Violence of Dreams (2001), and the contemporary photographs of the queer activist Zanele Muholi. Munro builds her concluding remarks, “Unrequited Utopia,” around an analysis of Ashraf Jamal’s novel Love Themes from the Wilderness (1996).

Munro finds that the texts she examines operate in often contradictory and ambiguous ways; they employ as well as evade, reproduce as well as resignify “Western language of sexual identity” (xix) because of “specific historical, political, and racial meanings that are bound up with the words ‘homosexual,’ ‘gay,’ ‘lesbian,’ and ‘bisexual.’” She suggests that the texts, with their “seismic shifts, contradictory and competing structures of feeling” have helped make possible the recent emergence of a more nuanced gay rights discourse (xix). Here the reader finds a queer reading practice that deftly enmeshes the textual with the sexual, historical, biographical, comparative, theoretical, and intertextual, producing original, and at times scintillating, interpretations.

Munro’s readings of her texts are at their best when she uncovers ambiguous, encoded, masked, and contradictory perspectives on sexuality and gender—for example, in the works of Brutus, Rive, Head, and Sello Duiker—as opposed to readings of the works of writers who consciously script gayness—for example, Achmat, Gordimer, and Coetzee. The final subject in the book, an examination of Muholi’s photographic images of black women’s bodies, particularly of black lesbians, is a sensitive appreciation of Muholi’s activist aesthetic, committed to both making visible previously elided and stereotyped noncitizens and helping us reconstitute the “‘new’ in South African/global culture” (233).

I reluctantly mention one criticism of this remarkable book—the uneven quality of the concluding remarks at the end of each chapter. While they often provide astute and helpful summary comments on the contents of the chapter and its significance for the contemporary and possible future state of queerness and the nation, they are occasionally perfunctory. I imagine that these concluding sections are either a hangover from the work’s origins in a doctoral dissertation or else an editorial imposition on the author.