This Introductory chapter sets out the historical, political, literary and cultural contexts for the chapters to follow. It focusses on the role the African National Congress played in South Africa’s transition from apartheid to democracy, paying close attention to the rifts, contradictions and dissonance in the world view and policies of the ruling party. It draws on recent scholarship to better understand the relations between class and race in the new South Africa. The chapter argues that change in South Africa needs to be considered ‘from the inside’, in terms of the ways its cultural features are felt at psycho-social levels. South African literary studies have, it is argued, tended towards a preoccupation with abstract historicity. Through an engagement with the work of Raymond Williams and Njabulo Ndebele, this chapter argues that South African literary criticism needs to shift from a focus on history to one on culture, and from abstraction into a more concrete enquiry into the everyday sociological realities of South Africans.