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This anthology consists of academic essays, creative non-fiction, poetry and short stories on race and racism by black women from South Africa and Brazil. Through these different genres, the book engages with the complexities of race in social, political, economic, institutional and personal spaces. Concerned with social justice, human rights and freedom, these writings spotlight the amalgamation of racial, gender and class subjectivities and how these are marked, un-marked, re-marked and re-made on bodies. The book connects globally and locally to social and political phenomena in the modern-day world. The contributors interrogate their political and personal worlds, revealing layered, intersecting ways of being that were essentially centred by colonial histories but not defined in totality by coloniality and oppression. In speaking to the proximity of these experiences, they reflect and narrate the past, contemplate the present and imagine the future. This curated anthology asks questions centred around freedom. What does freedom mean? When do we have it, and when do we not? Most importantly, how do we get it? Print edition not for sale in Sub Saharan Africa.
We each make sense of the world through our embodied, feeling lives. We do it through the social groupings, contexts and processes which history (rather than biology) presents and assigns to us. In this collection, we aim to illustrate how these embodied feelings and emotions underpin contemporary theorising by sharing reflective autobiographical writing by individuals from a wide range of backgrounds and contexts. This somewhat unruly collection unsettles conventional academic writing precisely because authors have grounded themselves in the tangible and the personal rather than in abstract theory. We hope that readers might see aspects of their own lives in some of these stories, develop better understandings of lives that are experienced very differently, and start (or continue) to theorise their own lives.
Looking across time and the globe, a critical history of sexual violence—what causes it and how we overcome it. Disgrace is the first truly global history of sexual violence. The book explores how sexual violence varies widely across time and place, from nineteenth-century peasant women in Ireland who were abducted as a way of forcing marriage, to date-raped high-school students in twentieth-century America, and from girls and women violated by Russian soldiers in 1945 to Dalit women raped by men of higher castes today. It delves into the factors that facilitate violence—including institutions, ideologies, and practices—but also gives voice to survivors and activists, drawing inspiration from their struggles. Ultimately, Joanna Bourke intends to forge a transnational feminism that will promote a more harmonious, equal, and rape- and violence-free world.
Are Truth and Reconciliation Commission processes enough to achieve reconciliation? This volume discusses issues that arise once the task of reconciliation emanates from the limited scope of a specific Truth and Reconciliation Commission and into the larger society and political system that originated it. Scholars spanning several research fields, from law to history to theology, discuss how transformative reconciliation can be cultivated in a society, using decolonization and other perspectives, along three lines: by specifying transformative issues and processes in law and politics, by criticizing historical perspectives on the past and its concepts as deliberations of the status quo, and ...
Ubuntu: Interdisciplinary Conversations Across Continents is a collection of work by 17 scholars emerging from the Ubuntu Dialogues Seminar Exchange Fellowship hosted by Stellenbosch University in South Africa and Michigan State University in the US between 2019 and 2022. This collaborative work brings new voices and new ways of interrogating a concept that holds possibilities for living together differently. The contributions problematise the concept in provocative and surprising ways and disrupt narrow and superficial interpretations of Ubuntu. --- The contributors to this book foreground critical issues which are fundamental towards a deeper understanding of the notion of ubuntu. – Dr Sithembele Marawu, University of Fort Hare This book features next generation rising stars from places such as South Africa, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Burundi, and the US, writing about ubuntu, the indigenous southern African term often used to capture African philosophy, especially its moral dimensions. A fresh, kaleidoscopic engagement with ubuntu. – Professor Thaddeus Metz, University of Pretoria
Multiculturalism is a concept that has been stretched to include a variety of political conditions, mainly in countries that have liberal democratic political systems and traditions. In this North/South ‘comparison’ we illuminate remedies pursued by governments and various political interests to address the binary. Tensions of culture and rights may not be the same everywhere. An interesting point of comparison is in the treatment of liberalism – often assumed in the global North to be the universal norms to be defended, whereas in the global South, liberalism itself may be viewed as the problem. Colonial histories are fraught with discriminatory legislation aimed at accommodating indi...
The Anthropocene’s urgent message about imminent disaster invites us to forget about history and to focus on the present as it careens into an unthinkable future. To counter this, Louise Green engages with the theoretical framing of nature in concepts such as the “Anthropocene,” “the great acceleration,” and “rewilding” in order to explore what the philosophy of nature in the era of climate change might look like from postcolonial Africa. Utilizing a practice of reading developed in the Frankfurt school, Green rearranges narrative fragments from the “global nature industry,” which subjugates all aspects of nature to the logic of capitalist production, in order to disrupt pr...
A politician's journey to bring home Mahatma Gandhi's teachings home to South Africa in the wake of WWII In November 1949, Davidson Don Tengo (D.D.T.) Jabavu, the South African politician, Methodist lay preacher and retired professor of African languages and Latin at Fort Hare University in the Eastern Cape, set out on a four-month trip to attend the World Pacifist Meeting in India. The conference brought together delegates from over thirty countries to reflect on how Mahatma Gandhi’s life and teachings could inform pacifist work in the post-World War II era. Jabavu wrote an isiXhosa account of his journey up the east coast of Africa and to different parts of India which was first publishe...
Family secrets run deep for Grace, a young girl growing up in Cape Town during the 1980s, spilling over into adulthood, and threatening to ruin the respectable life she has built for herself. When an old childhood friend reappears, Grace’s memories of her childhood come rushing back, and she is confronted, once again, with the loss that has shaped her. She has to face up to the truth or continue to live a lie - but the choice is not straightforward. Grace is an intimate portrayal of violence, both personal and political, and its legacy on one person’s life. It meditates on the long shadow cast by personal trauma, showing the inter-generational imprint of violence and loss on people’s lives.
Examining postcolonial transcultural practice from a range of disciplinary and methodological perspectives, this study seeks to analyse laughter and the postcolonial in their complexity. It gathers a group of international specialists in postcolonial transcultural studies to analyse the functions of humour in a wide range of cultural texts.