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, author of the bestelling Rape: A South African Nightmare.

In her most personal book to date, written from classic Gqola anti-racist, feminist perspectives, Reflecting Rogue delivers fourteen essays of deliciously incisive brain food, all extremely accessible to a general critical readership, without sacrificing intellectual rigour.

Catapulted into national prominence with the release of her multiple-award-winning debut album, Zandisile, in 2005, Simphiwe Dana has since carved a place for herself as one of the most significant artists of her generation using a unique combination of jazz, rap and traditional music. 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 feminist exploration of the public lives of performer Simphiwe Dana - a rebel with several causes, in eight essays, award winning author, Prof Gqola brilliantly shows why Dana is arguably one of the most significant cultural figures working in contemporary South Africa today.

Fluctuating public responses to Ms Dana show us something about South African sensitivities to Blackness, femininity, language and the imagination.

"Patriarchy does not respect national boundaries. It is unabashedly promiscuous in its influences and tethers. Yet, it does use nationalism very productively." 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, higher education rape sexual harassment and femicide are all premised on the construction of people, mostly women, as female, and thereafter the use fear as a tool of patriarchal subjugation and punishment.

Miriam Tlali was a novelist, short story writer, playwright, essayist, and an activist against apartheid and patriarchal confinement. She worked consistently to build literary and political community, was one of the founders of Staffrider magazine, promoted the work of younger writers, and was the most prolific writer of her time. Hailed as the first black woman to publish a novel within the country in English under apartheid, and as the first black woman to significantly impact the male terrain of South African short story writing, Tlali held the mantle of many firsts. Fiercely opposed to censorship, she went to great length to undermine the will and impact of the apartheid censors, and wrote many essays exposing the violence and hypocrisy of apartheid censors. A prolific writer whose plays were performed on two continents, Tlali was routinely banned in South Africa – once after a mere public reading of a story before it was even published. Tlali was recognised as an important South African literary voice, and her first novel was translated into Japanese, Dutch, German and Polish, while it remained banned in the country of her birth. This new addition to the Voices of Liberation series, Miriam Tlali: Writing Freedom, brings together select original writing by Tlali with analyses of the many ways in which she imagined freedom. Like the other books in the Voices of Liberation series, this title surfaces how Tlali’s writing of freedom retains relevance beyond the specific site and conditions of its emergence.

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.

South Africa has been called the 'rape capital'. Is this label accurate? What do South Africans think they know about rape? South Africa has a complex relationship with rape. Pumla Dineo Gqola unpacks this relationship by paying attention to patterns and trends of rape, asking what we can learn from famous cases and why South Africa is losing the battle against rape. Gqola looks at the 2006 rape trial of Jacob Zuma and what transpired in the trial itself, as well as trying to make sense of public responses to it. She interrogates feminist responses to the Anene Booysen case, amongst other high profile cases of gender-based violence. Rape: A South African Nightmare is a necessary book for various reasons. While volumes exist on rape in South Africa, much of this writing exists either in academic journals, activist publications or analysis pages of select print media. This is a conclusive book on rape in South Africa, illuminating aspects of South Africa's rape problem in South Africa, illuminating aspects of South Africa's rape problem and contributing to shifting the conversation forward. It is indebted to insights from available research, activism, the author's own immersion in Rape Crisis, the 1 in 9 Campaign and feminist scholarship. Analytically rigorous, it is intended for a general readership.

Why does it matter that nations should care for their archives, and that they should develop a sense of shared identity? And why should these processes take place in the public domain? How can nations possibly speak about a shared sense of identity in pluralistic societies where individuals and groups have multiple identities? And how can such conversations be given relevance in public discussions of reconciliation and development in South Africa? These are the issues that the Public Conversations lecture series - an initiative of the Constitution of Public Intellectual Life Project at Wits University - proceeded from in 2006. Five years later, cross currents in contemporary South Africa have made the resumption of a public debate to clarify the meanings of identity and citizenship even more imperative, and an understanding of 'archive' even more urgent. The 2006 lectures were subsequently collected, resulting in this volume which takes its title from Weber's point, elaborated on in the chapter by Benedict Anderson, that the future asks us to be worthy ancestors to the yet unborn. The book, as did the lecture series, aims to reach a broad and informed reading public because the topic is still of pressing interest in contemporary public discourse. In a changed (and, some might say, degraded) environment of public dialogue, the editor hopes to inspire a re-thinking of the very essence of what it means to be a citizen of South Africa. Becoming Worthy Ancestors aims to make accessible the theoretically informed, sometimes highly academic work of its various contributors. With chapters from high profile international and local contributors, it will be of interest to South African and international audiences. Editing for publication has further enhanced the accessibility of each speaker's thinking without forfeiting any of its complexity, and the addition of an introductory chapter by the editor contributes to the coherence of the volume. While the target audience is the broad public, the book is based on a core of academic thinking and research.