Category: Featured book
These Potatoes Look Like Humans critiques the narrow materialist and legalistic arguments about the land question to recognise that, for most Black South Africans, the meanings of land and dispossession are linked with spirituality and being. These Potatoes Look Like Humans offers a unique understanding of the intersection between land, labour, dispossession and violence experienced by Black…
Philosopher Lewis Gordon, long one of the most prominent scholars of racism, tries to enrich our knowledge with his unique brand of intellectual precision and analysis. Fear of Black Consciousness is in the tradition of his fellow Jamaican-born intellectual, the late Stuart Hall, who pioneered engaging with popular culture to understand the world. Using his own experiences and a…
At first glance, Will the Flower Slip Through the Asphalt is an alluring collection of some of best minds in climate politics. It is only a serendipitous delight to find Amitav Ghosh, Naomi Klein and Ghassan Hage in a breezy, intersubjective, heuristic study on global environmental politics. But the real icing on the cake is the step…
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…
This interview was taken from Black Agenda Report This book challenges the myth that 1994 was the turning point in South Africa – because the liberation process is unfinished. “Forced removals were not considered in the famous 1994 Truth and Reconciliation Process.” In this series, we ask acclaimed authors to answer five questions about their…
This review was written by Niren Tolsi and originally appeared on New Frame The new novel, Children of Sugarcane, reckons with the “colonial fingerprints” on our contemporary society, while providing a nuanced view of indenture and its afterlives. Joanne Joseph isn’t as tall as she appears on television. This is the first, and most banal, impression…
This is a lightly edited excerpt from Jeremy Cronin’s review of Tom Lodge’s book Red Road to Freedom: A History of the South African Communist Party 1921–2021 (Jacana, 2021). This review was first published in the centenary edition of African Communist (Issue 205, Second and third quarters 2021). In late July 1921 a pioneer Communist Party of South Africa, later renamed…
In a time of ecological crisis, it is unsurprising that questions of the body have become a focal point within contemporary radical politics. One of the great strengths of Silvia Federici’s peerless work in this regard is to remind us that bodies have multiple histories. There are the histories of techniques of capturing and disciplining…