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African Leadership
African Leadership is an edited collection enriched by the people who have lived and experienced indigenous leadership first-hand, demonstrating how African leadership is distinctive from usual Western hegemonic paradigms.
Bulletproof
In 1856 and 1857, in response to a prophet’s command, the Xhosa people of southern Africa killed their cattle and ceased planting crops; the resulting famine cost tens of thousands of lives. Much like other millenarian, anticolonial movements—such as the Ghost Dance in North America and the Birsa Munda uprising in India—these actions were meant to transform the world and liberate the Xhosa from oppression. Despite the movement’s momentous failure to achieve that goal, the event has continued to exert a powerful pull on the South African imagination ever since. It is these afterlives of the prophecy that Jennifer Wenzel explores in Bulletproof. Wenzel examines literary and historical texts to show how writers have manipulated images and ideas associated with the cattle killing—harvest, sacrifice, rebirth, devastation—to speak to their contemporary predicaments. Widening her lens, Wenzel also looks at how past failure can both inspire and constrain movements for justice in the present, and her brilliant insights into the cultural implications of prophecy will fascinate readers across a wide variety of disciplines.
EnvironMentality.
This book addresses the role and potential of literature in the process of contesting and re-evaluating concepts of nature and animality, describing one’s individual environment as the starting point for such negotiations. It employs the notion of the ‘literary event’ to discuss the specific literary quality of verbal art conceptualised as EnvironMentality. EnvironMentality is grounded on the understanding that fiction does not explain or second scientific and philosophical notions but that it poses a fundamental challenge to any form of knowledge manifesting in processes determined by the human capacity to think beyond a given hermeneutic situation. Bartosch foregrounds the dialectics of understanding the other by means of literary interpretation in ecocritical readings of novels by Amitav Ghosh, Zakes Mda, Yann Martel, Margaret Atwood and J.M. Coetzee, arguing that EnvironMentality helps us as readers of fiction to learn from the books we read that which can only be learned by means of reading: to “think like a mountain” (Aldo Leopold) and to know “what it is like to be a bat” (Thomas Nagel).
Remembering the Nation, Dismembering Women?
Remembering the Nation, Dismembering Women? explores the ways in which the imaginative reconstruction of post-apartheid South Africa as 'rainbow nation' has been produced from images of women that dismember their bodies and disremember their historical presence. From Krotoa-Eva and Sarah Bartmann to Nongqawuse and Winnie Mandela, Samuelson tackles the figurations of some of the most controversial and significant women in the making of modern South Africa. Drawing on feminist, postcolonial and post-structuralist theory and close textual readings of literary and cultural texts produced during the first decade of democracy, her analysis offers a provocative critique of the formation of nationalist and feminist collectivities. The book explores the constraints of subjection and the performative power of subjectivity, as well as the ways in which women have been able to form collectivities on new terms. Book jacket.
The Heart of Redness
In the mid-nineteenth century, in the village of Qolorha on the eastern Cape coast, a girl called Nongqawuse brought a message from the ancestors to the amaXhosa people: to slaughter their cattle and destroy their cropts, so that the ancestors would return from the dead, bringing with them new cattle and crops, and drive the white colonists into the sea. People were divided between Believers, who slew their cattle, and Unbelievers, who did not. The prophecies did not come true, and the power of the amaXhosa people was shattered. One hundred and fifty years later, the feud between the Believers and the Unbelievers still festers in Qolorha, as the villagers take opposing sides on every issue. When the village is faced witha plan to build a casino and holiday resort, the feud threatens to erupt into open conflict. Moving betwen the worlds of contemporary characters and their nineteenth-century ancestors, Zakes Mda's new novel is a triumph of imaginative and historical writing, showing how the past continues to live in the present.
Mayibuye: 25 Years of Democracy in South Africa
'The attainment of liberty was the first decisive step in the path of reconstruction and development: a path that sought to harness the life experiences, skills, energies and aspirations of the people of South Africa towards the complete eradication of apartheid and its vestiges, as well as the building of a united democratic, non-racial, non-sexist and prosperous future for all. However, the road ahead remains long, steep and winding. More still needs to be done to translate our freedom into profound socio-economic change in the lives of many South Africans, to whom the great promise and optimism of 1994 has given way to disappointment and hopelessness. In this collection of poetry, Lawrence Mduduzi Ndlovu retraces our steps as a nation from the period immediately preceding freedom and democracy in 1994 to where we are 25 years later'.
