Pumla Dineo Gqola

Why has South Africa been labelled the 'world's rape capital'? What don't we as South Africans understand about rape? In Rape: A South African Nightmare, Pumla Dineo Gqola unpacks the complex relationship South Africa has with rape by paying attention to the patterns and trends of rape, asking what we can learn from famous cases and why South Africa is losing the battle against rape. This highly readable book leaps off the dusty book shelves of academia by asking penetrating questions and examining the shock belief syndrome that characterises public responses to rape, the female fear factory, boy rape, the rape of Black lesbians and violent masculinities. The book interrogates the high profile rape trials of Jacob Zuma, Bob Hewitt, Makhaya Ntini and Baby Tshepang as well as the feminist responses to the Anene Booysen case.

A South African Nightmare

Rape

Panashe Chigumadzi

Sisonke Msimang

Zukiswa Wanner

Zoë Wicomb

Yewande Omotoso

Barbara Boswell

Desiree Lewis

Gabeba Baderoon

Grace A. Musila

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

Reflecting Rogue is the much anticipated and brilliant collection of experimental autobiographical essays on power, pleasure and South African culture by Professor Pumla Dineo Gqola. In her most personal book to date, written from classic Gqola anti-racist, feminist perspectives, Reflecting Rogue delivers 20 essays of deliciously incisive brain food, all extremely accessible to a general critical readership, without sacrificing intellectual rigor. These include essays on 'Disappearing Women', where Gqola spends time exploring what it means to live in a country where women can simply disappear - from a secure Centurion estate in one case, to being a cop in another, and being taken by men who know them. 'On the beauty of feminist rage' magically weaves together the shift in gender discourse in South Africa's public spheres, using examples from #RUReferenceList, #RapeAtAzania and #RememberingKhwezi. While 'I've got all my sisters with me' explores the heady heights of feminist joy, 'A meditation on feminist friendship with gratitude' exposes a new, and more personal side to ever-incisive Gqola.

Inside the Mind of a Feminist

Reflecting Rogue

Sunil Amrith

Antoinette Burton

Sarah Nuttall

Carolyn Hamilton

Lakshmi Subramanian

Ranka Primorac

James Ogude

Meg Samuelson

Karin Barber

Charne Lavery

Khwezi Mkhize

Christopher EW Ouma

Rimli Bhattacharya

Danai S Mupotsa

Madhumita Lahiri

This book covers concepts and methods from the work of Isabel Hofmeyr, a leading South African scholar of print cultures and intellectual trajectories in the Atlantic and Indian oceans.

African print cultures and oceanic turns in Isabel Hofmeyr’s work

Reading from the South

Dorothy Black

The Dot Spot: Adventures in love and sex will be South Africa's first, fun and frank 'how-to' guide on untangling the mysteries of sex, love and relationships. Written in Dot's upfront, entertaining and sassy style, the book uncovers everything you've ever wanted to know about dating and relationships, from kink to sexual self-empowerment.

Adventures in Love and Sex

The Dot Spot

Memory, Diaspora and Spiced Bodies in Motion

Patriarchy does not respect national boundaries. It is unabashedly promiscuous in its influences and tethers. Yet, it does use nationalism very productively. An empty street at night. A crowded bus. A lecture hall. All sites of female fear, instilled in women and those who have been constructed female, from an early age. Drawing on examples from around the world - from Uganda, Nigeria, South Africa to Saudi Arabia, the Americas and Europe, Gqola traces the construction and machinations of the female fear factory by exposing its lies, myths, and seductions. She shows how seemingly disparate effects, like driving bans, street harassment, and coercive professors, are the product of the ever-turning machinery of the female fear factory, and its use of fear as a tool of patriarchal subjugation and punishment. Female Fear Factory: Gender and Patriarchy under Racial Capitalism is a sobering account of patriarchal violence in the world, and a hopeful vision for the work of unapologetic feminist imaginative strategies across the globe.

Gender and Patriarchy Under Racial Capitalism

Female Fear Factory

In eight essays, Pumla Dineo Gqola shows why Simphiwe Dana is arguably the most significant cultural figure working in contemporary South Africa today. Dana’s musical repertoire, self-styling choices, public debates, and growing written output display her causes. Controversy, tabloid headlines, and fluctuating public responses to Dana all reveal South African sensitivities on Blackness, femininity, language, and the imagination. Part intellectual biography and part commentary on South African contemporary culture, Gqola has captured a must-read portrait of Dana, her music and writing, her cultural activism, the vision in her work, and changing politics against the background of a changing postapartheid popular culture.

A Renegade Called Simphiwe

A study of slave memory in South Africa using feminist, postcolonial and memory studies Much has been made about South Africa's transition from histories of colonialism, slavery and apartheid. 'Memory' features prominently in the country's reckoning with its pasts. While there has been an outpouring of academic essays, anthologies and other full-length texts which study this transition, most have focused on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). What is slavery to me? is the first full-length study of slave memory in the South African context, and examines the relevance and effects of slave memory for contemporary negotiations of South African gendered and racialised identities. It draws from feminist, postcolonial and memory studies and is therefore interdisciplinary in approach. It reads memory as one way of processing this past, and interprets a variety of cultural, literary and filmic texts to ascertain the particular experiences in relation to slave pasts being fashioned, processed and disseminated. Much of the material surveyed across disciplines attributes to memory, or 'popular history making', a dialogue between past and present whilst ascribing sense to both the eras and their relationship. In this sense then, memory is active, entailing a personal relationship with the past which acts as mediator of reality on a day to day basis. The projects studies various negotiations of raced and gendered identities in creative and other public spaces in contemporary South Africa, by being particularly attentive to the encoding of consciousness about the country's slave past. This book extends memory studies in South Africa, provokes new lines of inquiry, and develops new frameworks through which to think about slavery and memory in South Africa.

Postcolonial/Slave Memory in post-apartheid South Africa

What is Slavery to Me?

Véronique Tadjo

Devan Pillay

Shireen Hassim

Tawana Kupe

Eric Worby

Alex Eliseev

Rolf Maruping

Daryl Glaser

Noor Nieftagodien

Stephen Gelb

Loren Landau

David Coplan

Julia Hornberger

Melinda Silverman

Tanya Zack

Anton Harber

Cathi Albertyn

Andile Mngxitama

The xenophobic attacks that started in Alexandra, Johannesburg in May 2008 before quickly spreading around the country caused an outcry across the world and raised many fundamental questions: Of what profound social malaise is xenophobia – and the violence that it inspires – a symptom? Have our economic and political choices created new forms of exclusion that fuel anger and distrust? What consequences does the emergence of xenophobia hold for the idea of an equal, non-racial society as symbolised by a democratic South Africa? On 28 May 2008 the Faculty of Humanities in the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg convened an urgent colloquium that focused on searching for short and long-term solutions. Nearly twenty individuals – mostly Wits academics from a variety of disciplines, but also two student leaders, a journalist and a bishop – addressed the unfolding violence in ways that were conversant with the moment, yet rooted in scholarship and ongoing research. Go Home or Die Here emanates directly from the colloquium. It hopes to make sense of the nuances and trajectories of building a democratic society out of a deeply divided and conflictual past, in the conditions of global recession, heightening inequalities and future uncertainty. The authors hoped to pose questions that would lead both to research and to more informed, reflective forms of public action. With extensive photographs by award-winning photographer Alon Skuy, who covered the violence for The Times newspaper, the volume is passionate and engaged, and aims to stimulate reflection, debate and activism among concerned members of a broad public.

Violence, Xenophobia and the Reinvention of Difference in South Africa

Go Home or Die Here

Hailed by the media as ‘South Africa’s Jazz Diva No#1’ and ‘the best thing to happen to Afro-Soul music since Miriam Makeba’, Dana is listened to and loved both locally and abroad. A Renegade Called Simphiwe, penned by highly respected writer, cultural rogue and academic, Professor Pumla Dineo Gqola, is part biography, part analysis; unconventional like its subject, and unravels the ‘Simphiwe phenomenon’ and the world that makes her possible.

Pumla Dineo Gqola

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