242 books
For more than sixty years, Ngugi wa Thiong’o has been writing fearlessly the questions, challenges, histories, and futures of Africans, particularly those of his homeland, Kenya. In his work, which has included plays, novels, and essays, Ngugi narrates the injustice of colonial violence and the dictatorial betrayal of decolonization, the fight for freedom and subsequent incarceration, and the aspiration toward economic equality in the face of gross ...
Maryse Condé is one of the best-known and most beloved French Caribbean literary voices. The author of more than twenty novels, she was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2015 and has long been recognized as a giant of black feminist literature. While Condé has previously published an autobiography of her childhood, What Is Africa to Me? tells for the first time the story of her early adult years in Africa—years formative ...
Novelist Zakes Mda has made a name for himself as a key chronicler of the new, post-apartheid South Africa, casting a satirical eye on its claims of political unity, its rising black middle class, and other aspects of its complicated, multiracial society.
In this novel, however, he turns his lens elsewhere: to a college town in Ohio. Here he finds human relations and the battle between the community and the individual no less compelling, or ridiculous. In Athens, ...
One of the towering classics of twentieth-century French literature, Phantom Africa is a singular and ultimately unclassifiable work: a book composed of one man’s compulsive and constantly mutating daily travel journal—by turns melodramatic, self-deprecating, ecstatic and morose—as well as an exhaustively detailed account of the first French state-sponsored anthropological expedition to visit sub-Saharan Africa.
In 1930, Michel Leiris was an ...
The old king now decides to hand over the reins of the kingdom to the eldest son and preparations are made for the coronation. Just then his second wife, to whom to king was especially attacked, asked for two deferred boons which she had earned through a special service to the king, and which he had promised to grant whenever she asked for them (The Vow and the Vision). She now wants to get her own son declared the heir to the throne, and the eldest prince to be ...
Asylum and Exile is the result of several months of personal outreach to refugees and asylum seekers that goes behind the headlines to reveal the humanity, tragedy, and bravery of the individuals who have left everything behind to seek sanctuary from violence in the UK. Bidisha offers moving stories of refugees who have fled war, violent persecution, or civil unrest in countries as diverse as Cameroon, Iran, Syria, Somalia, Malawi, Burundi, the Congo, and Sierra ...
Over the last twenty years, William Kentridge has built a worldwide reputation as a contemporary artist, best known for his series of ten animated films created from charcoal drawings. The films introduced a significant character in contemporary fiction: Soho Eckstein, a Highveld mining magnate and Kentridge’s alter ego. Set in his hometown of Johannesburg, the films use South Africa’s political transformation from apartheid to democracy as a backdrop ...
Molissa Fenley, one of the most influential artists of postmodern dance, has had a lasting impact on performance. In dance, she has explored extreme effort and duration in highly crafted patterns and performed with an explosive, joyous energy that infused her work with endurance, balance, and life force. She challenged modern dance orthodoxy and redefined the character of a woman’s moving body in the late twentieth century, bringing postmodernized ritual to ...
Over the last twenty years, William Kentridge has built a worldwide reputation as a contemporary artist, best known for his series of ten animated films created from charcoal drawings. In Accounts and Drawings from Underground, Kentridge and Rosalind C. Morris bring us an unprecedented collaboration, where they have taken the pages of the 1906 Cash Book of the East Rand Proprietary Mines Corporation and transformed it into something wholly new. Kentridge ...
The re-issue of Richard Turner’s Eye of the Needle comes at a critical time in South African history, along side the revival of Black Consciousness and a reconsideration of what Tony Morphet famously called the ‘Durban Moment’. Turner was a central figure in the white South African student movement, and a key figure in the radicalization of its critical project. Inspired by events in Paris ’68, he returned to South Africa after acquiring ...