Böcker i The Africa List-serien

When apartheid ended in 1994, a radiant national optimism suggested a bright future for the new, unified South Africa. Using the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission as a starting point, this book includes essays that explore texts from every corner of South Africa in an attempt to remap the borders of her country's communities.

For nearly four decades, the author, best known for her novels "Segu" and "Windward Heights", has been at the forefront of French Caribbean literature. In this collection of essays and lectures, written over many years and in response to the challenges posed by a changing world, she reflects on the ideas and histories that have moved her.

The "Modern Sovereign," a notion indebted both to Hobbes's Leviathan and Marx's conception of capital, refers to the power that governed the African multitudes from the earliest colonial days to the post-colonial era. It is an internalized power, responsible for the multiform violence exerted on bodies and imaginations. Joseph Tonda contends that in Central Africa--and particularly in Gabon and the Congo--the body is at the heart of political, religious, sexual, economic, and ritual power. This, he argues, is confirmed by the strong link between corporeal and political matters, and by the ostentatious display of bodies in African life. The body of power asserts itself as both matter and spirit, and it incorporates the seductive force of money, commodities, sex, and knowledge. Tonda's incisive analysis reveals how this sovereign power is a social relation, historically constituted by the violence of the African cultural Imaginary and the realities of State, Market, and Church. It is to be understood, he asserts, through a generalized theory economic, political, and religious fetishism. By introducing this crucial critical voice from contemporary Africa into the English language, The Modern Sovereign makes a significant contribution to field of anthropology, political science, and African studies.

One of South Africa‿s best-known writers during the apartheid era, Alex La Guma was a lifelong activist and a member of the South African Communist Party and the African National Congress. Persecuted and imprisoned by the South African regime in the 1950s and 60s, La Guma went into exile in the United Kingdom with his wife and children in 1966, eventually serving as the ANC‿s diplomatic representative for Latin America and the Caribbean in Cuba. Culture and Liberation captures a different dimension of his long writing career by collecting his political journalism, literary criticism, and other short pieces published while he was in exile.   This volume spans La Guma‿s political and literary life in exile through accounts of his travels to Algeria, Lebanon, Vietnam, Soviet Central Asia, and elsewhere, along with his critical assessments of Paul Robeson, Nadine Gordimer, Maxim Gorky, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and Pablo Neruda, among other writers. The first dedicated collection of La Guma‿s exile writing, Culture and Liberation restores an overlooked dimension of his life and work, while opening a window on a wider world of cultural and political struggles in Africa, Asia, and Latin America during the second half of the twentieth century. Â

In an unnamed African nation, the people are subject to a state of perpetual warfare and an Orwellian abuse of language that strips away meaning and renders life senseless. And in a bare room lit only by moonlight, a young man hides, waiting for the mysterious crocodile-men to come and help him escape from the violent tyranny of the state.

IN

Master storyteller Ngugi wa Thiong'o blends myth and folklore with insight into the human psyche and the patterns of politics in this fable of how humans came to walk upright, set to appeal to both adults and children. Sunandini Banerjee illustrates.

Translation of: Mets et merveilles"--Copyright page.

For more than three decades, the author has explored in his work the nature of subjectivity, the possibilities of revolution, the Enlightenment's legacy in Africa, and the nature of time itself. In this book, he explains the key concerns of his art, including the virtues of bastardy, the ethics of provisionality, and the activity of the viewer.

Poetry that serves as an evocative portrayal of diverse landscapes and cultures.   In these otherworldly poetry sequences, Samira Negrouche reminds us that "all life is movement," where "time passes through me / beings pass through me / they are me / I am them." The "I" is representative of one voice, three voices, all voices, all rooted in movement as their bodies brush past one another, brush against thresholds of time and space. Everything is in flux-including the dream-like landscapes at the borders of borders-as the poet seeks to recover parts of self and memory, on both a personal and universal level. In these poems, history-laden locales such as Algiers, Timbuktu, N'Djamena, Cotonou, Zanzibar, Cape Town, and Gorée are evoked. Even the language, expertly and sensitively translated by Nancy Naomi Carlson, refuses to be pinned down, as it loops back on itself. At times contradictory, at times fractured in meaning, syntax, and diction, the playful language is riddled with "restless" verbs. In the end, the "I" takes on prophetic overtones, instilling hope for the future.