Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities by Carl Nightingale (University of Chicago Press, 2012) examines the world history of segregation, highlighting the notorious role played by South Africa in dividing communities along racial lines (a central case study is Johannesburg). As Nightingale reminds us, segregation in South Africa began long before it became formally […]
At the end of 2011 we contemplated asking you, dear reader, who you think was the most influential African thinker alive. We abandoned the idea for a while because of our thing against lists (except our end of year lists, of course). I got the initial idea from the British blog, Left Foot Forward, which had […]
It was with some intrigue that my J.M. Coetzee google alert recently informed me that the elusive author had published something new; this time, apparently, in a contribution to a book celebrating, of all things, Australian cricket.
Years ago, during my first years as a hired hand in academia, I was more careful about doing The Right Thing. I’d read JM Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians as a student, and something clicked for me – the colonial mentality, the hopeless fantasies of each successive militarised ‘civilisation’ – in a way that no […]
Writer Imraan Coovadia, on lit magazine n+1‘s blog, writing about the tenplate for “the South African story” in Western media: … In the run up to the [2010] World Cup even usually intelligent publications like Harper’s and the London Review of Books were replicating the hoariest clichés in sight. Each magazine had rented out space to its […]
The Gulf newspaper, The National, has a profile on “the South African giant of contemporary literature” JM Coetzee in which, unsurprisingly, other people does all the talking. It also rehashes all the familiar controversies of the last few years around the elusive Coetzee (his lack of overt political involvement during the struggle against Apartheid; the […]
J M Coetzee reads from his new novel, “Summertime,” forthcoming from Viking in December (in the United States), for The New York Review of Books podcast: [You can also read the excerpt here]
“The New York Review of Books” excerpted a few pages from J M Coetzee’s new novel, “Summertime,” to be published later this month in the UK and in October in the US. I have already posted one excerpt. Here is a second: 3 June 1975 From where he and the Truscotts live one has only […]
