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Breaking Rocks
Based on fieldwork in Kinshasa and Paris, Breaking Rocks examines patronage payments within Congolese popular music, where a love song dedication can cost 6,000 dollars and a simple name check can trade for 500 or 600 dollars. Tracing this system of prestige through networks of musicians and patrons – who include gangsters based in Europe, kleptocratic politicians in Congo, and lawless diamond dealers in northern Angola – this book offers insights into ideologies of power and value in central Africa’s troubled post-colonial political economy, as well as a glimpse into the economic flows that make up the hidden side of the globalization.
Dictators, Dictatorship and the African Novel
This book examines the representation of dictators and dictatorships in African fiction. It examines how the texts clarify the origins of postcolonial dictatorships and explore the shape of the democratic-egalitarian alternatives. The first chapter explains the ‘neoliberal’ period after the 1970s as an effective ‘recolonization’ of Africa by Western states and international financial institutions. Dictatorship is theorised as a form of concentrated economic and political power that facilitates Africa’s continued dependency in the context of world capitalism. The deepest aspiration of anti-colonial revolution remains the democratization of these authoritarian states inherited from the colonial period. This book discusses four novels by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Ahmadou Kourouma, Chinua Achebe and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in order to reveal how their themes and forms dramatize this unfinished struggle between dictatorship and radical democracy.
Temples of Delight
'Temples of Delight makes you laugh and it moves you' Sunday Times 'A joyous and winking style reliant on coincidence and irony, sparkling sung ... As messy, glorious and strange as life itself' Lauren Groff Jem is a joyful mystery to Alice: a whirl of glamour, subversion and literary references. And when she disappears from Alice's life, as suddenly as she entered it, Alice is left bereft. But then she meets Giovanni, presumptuous and hectoring, passionate and beautiful, who leads her back to her childhood friend and the mystery and chaos still surrounding her. Alice finds herself being seduced all over again... 'So readable, so full of incidental pleasures and curiosities ... In her readability, her richness, her plain, clear style, Trapido is quite like what Iris Murdoch is supposed to be' Philip Hensher, Guardian 'Very funny ... fizzes along at a cracking pace' Sunday Telegraph 'As lush and original as it is playful and ironic ... Quirky, wise and warm, full of charm and entirely original' San Francisco Chronicle
Frankie & Stankie
Dinah and her sister Lisa are growing up in 1950s South Africa, where racial laws are tightening. They are two little girls from a dissenting liberal family. Big sister Lisa is strong and sensible, while Dinah is weedy and arty. At school, the sadistic Mrs Vaughan-Jones is providing instruction in mental arithmetic and racial prejudice. And then there's the puzzle of lunch break. "Would you rather have a native girl or a koelie to make your sandwiches?" a first-year classmate asks. But Dinah doesn't know the answer, because it's her dad who makes her sandwiches. As the apparatus of repression rolls on, Dinah finds her own way. As we follow her journey through childhood and adolescence, we enter into one of the darker passages of twentieth-century history.
Intellectuals and (Counter-) Politics
Contemporary forms of capitalism and the state require close analytic attention to reveal the conditions of possibility for effective counter-politics. On the other hand the practice of collective politics needs to be studied through historical ethnography if we are to understand what might make people’s actions effective. This book suggests a research agenda designed to maximize the political leverage of ordinary people faced with ever more remote states and technologies that make capitalism increasingly rapacious. Gavin Smith opens and closes this series of interlinked essays by proposing a concise framework for untangling what he calls “the society of capital” and subsequently a potentially controversial way of seeing its contemporary features. This book tackles the political conundrums of our times and asks what roles intellectuals might play therein.
The Reconstruction of Post-War Labour Markets in The Southern African Development Community
This book provides a comprehensive overview of post-war labour market reconstructions, in the context of a regional bloc whose member states have experienced conflict. Focusing on the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region, the book explores how major conflicts often expose shortcomings in affected countries particularly on their post-war labour market reconstruction processes. The authors discuss how countries in the SADC region in particular are equipped to navigate such processes. This key question drives the overview of relationships between labour market issues and wars of liberation from colonial rule and apartheid, rights to self-determination and racial (in)equality and...
Sex and Stravinsky
AN ASTOUNDING NOVEL FROM THE AUTHOR OF FRANKIE AND STANKIE AND BROTHER OF THE MORE FAMOUS JACK ____________________ 'A dazzling achievement. It's beautifully-written, deftly-plotted and moves skilfully from domestic drama to global themes and back again' - Daily Express 'Delightful and brilliantly choreographed comedy' - Sunday Times ____________________ The time is 1995, but everybody has a past. Brilliant Australian Caroline can command everyone except her own ghoulish mother, which means that things aren't easy for Josh and Zoe, her husband with Stravinsky-glasses and twelve-year-old daughter. Zoe reads girls' ballet books and longs for lessons; a thing denied her until a chance encounter...
Racism without Racists
Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s acclaimed Racism without Racists examines in detail how Whites talk, think, and account for the existence of racial inequality and makes clear that color-blind racism is as insidious now as ever. The sixth edition of this provocative book includes new material on systemic racism and how color-blind racism framed many issues during the COVID-19 pandemic. A revised conclusion addresses what readers can do to confront racism—both personally and on a larger structural level. New to this edition: New Chapter 2, “What is Systemic Racism? Coming to Terms with How Racism Shapes ‘All’ Whites (and Non-Whites)” explains how all members of society participate in struc...
Fifty Years of Peasant Wars in Latin America
Informed by Eric Wolf’s Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century, published in 1969, this book examines selected peasant struggles in seven Latin American countries during the last fifty years and suggests the continuing relevance of Wolf’s approach. The seven case studies are preceded by an Introduction in which the editors assess the continuing relevance of Wolf’s political economy. The book concludes with Gavin Smith’s reflection on reading Eric Wolf as a public intellectual today.
The PhD Experience in African Higher Education
The PhD Experience in African Higher Education, edited by Ruth Murambadoro, John Mashayamombe, and uMbuso weNkosi, addresses the growing call to invest in the humanities and social sciences by exploring the nature of doctoral training in select institutions of higher learning in South Africa. In the past two decades, South Africa has become a key player in the global higher education landscape and dubbed the hub for doctoral training in Africa because of its developed educational infrastructure and highly ranked universities. Given South Africa’s positioning, the contributors in this volume argue that the government, donors, universities, and faculty have a socio-legal duty to ensure that ...
