Rita Barnard is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania and Professor Extraordinaire at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. She is the author of The Great Depression and the Culture of Abundance (Cambridge University Press, 1995) and Apartheid and Beyond: South African Writers and the Politics of Place (2006). Her work has appeared in several important collections about South African culture and in journals such as Novel, Contemporary Literature, Cultural Studies, Research in African Literatures, and Modern Fiction Studies.