Author: Ryan

This August marks one hundred years since the birth of Noni Jabavu. Makhosazana Xaba reflects on the life of this legendary writer: a woman of words, and a citizen of the world. ‘Noni Jabavu returns home’ is the title of a biographical fragment I wrote during the first semester of my MA at Wits University in…

In Abolition Geography, contemporary thinker Ruth Wilson Gilmore looks at crime, incarceration and alternatives that focus on social upliftment rather than the prison-industrial complex. American scholar and activist Ruth Wilson Gilmore is one of the most important contemporary thinkers on the key political issues of crime, police power and justice. In her 2007 book Golden Gulag, she…

This interview is republished from The Johannesburg Review of Books website. What today exists as South Africa cannot be understood outside of violence, whose origins require us to turn to the antiblack settler colonial capitalist and patriarchal order that produced suffering that spans across generations. The continuities of this violence not only challenge our understanding…