Grace A. Musila

Routledge Handbook of African Popular Culture

Panashe Chigumadzi

Sisonke Msimang

Zukiswa Wanner

Zoë Wicomb

Yewande Omotoso

Barbara Boswell

Pumla Dineo Gqola

Desiree Lewis

Gabeba Baderoon

Zethu Matebeni

Yvette Abrahams

gertrude fester-wicomb

Mary Hames

jackï job

Ingrid Masondo

Patricia McFadden

Danai S. Mupotsa

Leigh-Ann Naidoo

Fatima Seedat

Sa’diyya Shaikh

The first collection of essays dedicated to contemporary Black South African feminist perspectives What do African feminist traditions that exist outside the canon look and feel like? What complex cultural logics are at work outside the centres of power? How do spirituality and feminism influence each other? What are the histories and experiences of queer Africans? What imaginative forms can feminist activism take? Surfacing: On Being Black and Feminist in South Africa is the first collection of essays dedicated to contemporary Black South African feminist perspectives. Leading feminist theorist, Desiree Lewis, and poet and feminist scholar, Gabeba Baderoon, have curated contributions by some of the finest writers and thought leaders. Radical polemic sits side by side with personal essays, and critical theory coexists with rich and stirring life histories. By including writings by Patricia McFadden, Panashe Chigumadzi, Sisonke Msimang, Zukiswa Wanner, Yewande Omotoso, Zoë Wicomb and Pumla Dineo Gqola alongside emerging thinkers, activists and creative practitioners, the collection demonstrates a dazzling range of feminist voices. The writers in these pages use creative expression, photography and poetry in eclectic, interdisciplinary ways to unearth and interrogate representations of Blackness, sexuality, girlhood, history, divinity, and other themes. Surfacing is indispensable to anyone interested in feminism from Africa which, the contributors show, is in vivid and challenging conversations with the rest of the world.

On being black and feminist in South Africa

Surfacing

Michael Titlestad

Karl van Wyk

The Plague Years collects scholarly and essayistic reflections on literary, visual, and sonic representations of the COVID-19 and other pandemics. These are placed alongside poetry and short fiction written in the first two years of quarantine or isolation. This range expresses the intellectual and imaginative struggle and ingenuity entailed in coming to terms with the rampant spread of disease and its emotional, cultural, and political consequences. The contributions are from diverse contexts: Africa (from Egypt to South Africa), China, Japan, the US, and Scandinavia. They consider some of the array of contemporary engagements: poems translated from Mandarin about the traumas of the frontline, Chinese calligraphic poetry printed on cartons of PPE, comments on the literary history of representing epidemics and pandemics, political analyses of the post-truth present, and the role of life-writing and gaming in an interrupted world. Given the generative and creative obliquity of many of its parts, this collection shifts how one thinks about the diseased present and the archival pasts on which it draws. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of English Studies in Africa.

Reflecting on Pandemics

The Plague Years

Re-examines this unresolved murder in Kenya and the underlying role of rumour, the media and inter-state relations on how the death has been reported and investigated.

Kenya, Britain and the Julie Ward Murder

A Death Retold in Truth and Rumour

Grace A. Musila

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