This study focuses on selected texts of South African female writer, Sindiwe Magona. The selected texts are To My Children’s Children (1990), Forced to Grow (1992), Beauty’s Gift (2012), Mother to Mother (1998), Living, Loving and Lying Awake at Night (1991) and When The Village Sleeps (2021). The study explores how Magona narrates the contestation of power and self-definition, delving into how she articulates the intersections of race, power, gender and class in the selected texts. In addition, the study draws on the works of Sindiwe Magona to examine, both longitudinally and genealogically, how race, gender and class intersect and entrench the oppression of women in apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa. The thesis demonstrates, through the nuanced analysis of characters, how Magona confronts the colonial legacies of inequality, racial discrimination and poverty. To achieve the aim of the study, inspiration is drawn from Spivak’s theory of the subaltern and racialised women. The study further appropriates Judith Butler’s (1989) ideas on the performativity of gender and identity, and Kimberlé Crenshaw’s (1989) concept of intersectionality to analyse continuities and discontinuities in Magona’s literary works. In tandem, this study further critiques how women bargain and negotiate with patriarchy and apartheid to attain freedom from domination. The study pays particular detail on black South African literary responses and reacts to the intersections. Planetarity becomes appropriate in the critical analysis of Beauty’s Gift (2012) and Living, Loving and Lying Awake at Night (1991) while the notion of locality provides sufficient lenses in examining When the Village Sleeps (2021) and Mother to Mother (1998). The geometric concept of marginality deepens analysis for both her autobiographies, namely To My Children’s Children (1990) and Forced to Grow (1992). The conclusions of this study are derived from the examination of the texts after probing how Magona’s female characters gain agency, voice and the right to self-definition.

Keywords: power, self-definition, marginality, race, gender, culture, identity