book

Books

The story of Eskom

Load-shedding, deepening privatization, and unaffordable electricity makes it difficult to imagine a pivot away from the neoliberal approach to South Africa’s climate crisis.

Projecting radicalism

Noni Jabavu was one of South Africa’s most trailblazing writers. Her commitment to elite ambivalence makes it difficult to hail her as a black feminist icon.

Reading List: Barbara Boswell

While editing a collection of the writings of South African feminist Lauretta Ngcobo, Barbara Boswell found inspiration in texts that reflected Ngcobo’s sense that writing is an exercise of freedom.

The imperial forest

Gregg Mitman’s 'Empire of Rubber' is less a historical reading of Liberia than a history of America and racial capitalism through the lens of a US corporate giant.

Makeshift modernity

The rise of African Speculative Fiction and other exciting cultural production indicates that modernity is not an exercise in “catching up” with Europe, but an entirely new condition.

Man of action

An interview with Brian Peterson, author of a new biography of Thomas Sankara. Peterson positions 1980s Burkina Faso as counterhegemonic to the neoliberal transition then.