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In 1978, the South African activist and novelist Alex La Guma
(1925-1985) published A Soviet Journey, a memoir of his travels in
the Soviet Union. Today it stands as one of the longest and most
substantive first-hand accounts of the USSR by an African writer.
La Guma's book is consequently a rare and important document of the
anti-apartheid struggle and the Cold War period, depicting the
Soviet model from an African perspective and the specific meaning
it held for those envisioning a future South Africa. For many
members of the African National Congress and the South African
Communist Party, the Soviet Union represented a political system
that had achieved political and economic justice through
socialism-a point of view that has since been lost with the
collapse of the USSR and the end of the Cold War. This new edition
of A Soviet Journey-the first since 1978-restores this vision to
the historical record, highlighting how activist-intellectuals like
La Guma looked to the Soviet Union as a paradigm of
self-determination, decolonization, and postcolonial development.
The introduction by Christopher J. Lee discusses these elements of
La Guma's text, in addition to situating La Guma more broadly
within the intercontinental spaces of the Black Atlantic and an
emergent Third World. Presenting a more expansive view of African
literature and its global intellectual engagements, A Soviet
Journey will be of interest to readers of African fiction and
non-fiction, South African history, postcolonial Cold War studies,
and radical political thought.
One of South Africa's best-known writers during the apartheid era,
Alex La Guma was a lifelong activist and a member of the South
African Communist Party and the African National Congress.
Persecuted and imprisoned by the South African regime in the 1950s
and 60s, La Guma went into exile in the United Kingdom with his
wife and children in 1966, eventually serving as the ANC's
diplomatic representative for Latin America and the Caribbean in
Cuba. Culture and Liberation captures a different dimension of his
long writing career by collecting his political journalism,
literary criticism, and other short pieces published while he was
in exile. This volume spans La Guma's political and literary life
in exile through accounts of his travels to Algeria, Lebanon,
Vietnam, Soviet Central Asia, and elsewhere, along with his
critical assessments of Paul Robeson, Nadine Gordimer, Maxim Gorky,
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and Pablo Neruda, among other writers. The
first dedicated collection of La Guma's exile writing, Culture and
Liberation restores an overlooked dimension of his life and work,
while opening a window on a wider world of cultural and political
struggles in Africa, Asia, and Latin America during the second half
of the twentieth century.
Psychiatrist, philosopher, and revolutionary, Frantz Fanon
(1925–1961) is one of the most important intellectuals of the
twentieth century. Born on the island of Martinique, he died in the
United States from cancer, following a meteoric career that took
him to France, Algeria, Tunisia, and numerous places in between. He
presented powerful critiques of racism, colonialism and nationalism
in his classic books, Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The
Wretched of the Earth (1961). Yet Fanon remains controversial,
given his advocacy of violent struggle, and, consequently, is often
misunderstood. This biography seeks to demythologise Fanon by
situating his life and ideas within the historical circumstances he
encountered. Synthesising a range of secondary literature with
first-hand readings of his work, it elevates enduring aspects of
Fanon’s legacy, while also countering interpretations of his
writing that have granted uncritical omniscience to his views.
Written with clarity and passion, Christopher Lee’s account
ultimately argues for the complexity of Frantz Fanon and his
continued importance today.
This clear and engaging introduction is the first book to assess
the ideas of Kwame Anthony Appiah, the Ghanaian-British philosopher
who is a leading public intellectual today. The book focuses on the
theme of 'identity' and is structured around five main topics,
corresponding to the subjects of his major works: race, culture,
liberalism, cosmopolitanism, and moral revolutions. This helpful
book: * Teaches students about the sources, opportunities, and
dilemmas of personal and social identity-whether on the basis of
race, gender, sexuality, or class, among others-in the purview of
Appiah. * Locates Appiah within a broader tradition of intellectual
engagement with these issues-involving such thinkers as W. E. B. Du
Bois, John Stuart Mill, and Martha Nussbaum-and, thus, how Appiah
is both an inheritor and innovator of preceding ideas. * Seeks to
inspire students on how to approach and negotiate identity politics
in the present. This book ultimately imparts a more diverse and
wider-reaching geographic sense of philosophy through the lens of
Appiah and his intellectual contributions, as well as emphasizing
the continuing social relevance of philosophy and critical theory
more generally to everyday life today.
In 1978, the South African activist and novelist Alex La Guma
(1925-1985) published A Soviet Journey, a memoir of his travels in
the Soviet Union. Today it stands as one of the longest and most
substantive first-hand accounts of the USSR by an African writer.
La Guma's book is consequently a rare and important document of the
anti-apartheid struggle and the Cold War period, depicting the
Soviet model from an African perspective and the specific meaning
it held for those envisioning a future South Africa. For many
members of the African National Congress and the South African
Communist Party, the Soviet Union represented a political system
that had achieved political and economic justice through
socialism-a point of view that has since been lost with the
collapse of the USSR and the end of the Cold War. This new edition
of A Soviet Journey-the first since 1978-restores this vision to
the historical record, highlighting how activist-intellectuals like
La Guma looked to the Soviet Union as a paradigm of
self-determination, decolonization, and postcolonial development.
The introduction by Christopher J. Lee discusses these elements of
La Guma's text, in addition to situating La Guma more broadly
within the intercontinental spaces of the Black Atlantic and an
emergent Third World. Presenting a more expansive view of African
literature and its global intellectual engagements, A Soviet
Journey will be of interest to readers of African fiction and
non-fiction, South African history, postcolonial Cold War studies,
and radical political thought.
This clear and engaging introduction is the first book to assess
the ideas of Kwame Anthony Appiah, the Ghanaian-British philosopher
who is a leading public intellectual today. The book focuses on the
theme of 'identity' and is structured around five main topics,
corresponding to the subjects of his major works: race, culture,
liberalism, cosmopolitanism, and moral revolutions. This helpful
book: * Teaches students about the sources, opportunities, and
dilemmas of personal and social identity-whether on the basis of
race, gender, sexuality, or class, among others-in the purview of
Appiah. * Locates Appiah within a broader tradition of intellectual
engagement with these issues-involving such thinkers as W. E. B. Du
Bois, John Stuart Mill, and Martha Nussbaum-and, thus, how Appiah
is both an inheritor and innovator of preceding ideas. * Seeks to
inspire students on how to approach and negotiate identity politics
in the present. This book ultimately imparts a more diverse and
wider-reaching geographic sense of philosophy through the lens of
Appiah and his intellectual contributions, as well as emphasizing
the continuing social relevance of philosophy and critical theory
more generally to everyday life today.
In Unreasonable Histories, Christopher J. Lee unsettles the
parameters and content of African studies as currently understood.
At the book's core are the experiences of multiracial Africans in
British Central Africa-contemporary Malawi, Zimbabwe, and
Zambia-from the 1910s to the 1960s. Drawing on a spectrum of
evidence-including organizational documents, court records,
personal letters, commission reports, popular periodicals,
photographs, and oral testimony-Lee traces the emergence of
Anglo-African, Euro-African, and Eurafrican subjectivities which
constituted a grassroots Afro-Britishness that defied colonial
categories of native and non-native. Discriminated against and
often impoverished, these subaltern communities crafted a
genealogical imagination that reconfigured kinship and racial
descent to make political claims and generate affective meaning.
But these critical histories equally confront a postcolonial reason
that has occluded these experiences, highlighting uneven imperial
legacies that still remain. Based on research in five countries,
Unreasonable Histories ultimately revisits foundational questions
in the field, to argue for the continent's diverse heritage and to
redefine the meanings of being African in the past and present-and
for the future.
In Unreasonable Histories, Christopher J. Lee unsettles the
parameters and content of African studies as currently understood.
At the book's core are the experiences of multiracial Africans in
British Central Africa-contemporary Malawi, Zimbabwe, and
Zambia-from the 1910s to the 1960s. Drawing on a spectrum of
evidence-including organizational documents, court records,
personal letters, commission reports, popular periodicals,
photographs, and oral testimony-Lee traces the emergence of
Anglo-African, Euro-African, and Eurafrican subjectivities which
constituted a grassroots Afro-Britishness that defied colonial
categories of native and non-native. Discriminated against and
often impoverished, these subaltern communities crafted a
genealogical imagination that reconfigured kinship and racial
descent to make political claims and generate affective meaning.
But these critical histories equally confront a postcolonial reason
that has occluded these experiences, highlighting uneven imperial
legacies that still remain. Based on research in five countries,
Unreasonable Histories ultimately revisits foundational questions
in the field, to argue for the continent's diverse heritage and to
redefine the meanings of being African in the past and present-and
for the future.
Psychiatrist, philosopher, and revolutionary, Frantz Fanon is one
of the most important intellectuals of the twentieth century. He
presented powerful critiques of racism, colonialism, and
nationalism in his classic books, Black Skin, White Masks (1952)
and The Wretched of the Earth (1961). This biography reintroduces
Fanon for a new generation of readers, revisiting these enduring
themes while also arguing for those less appreciated-namely, his
anti-Manichean sensibility and his personal ethic of radical
empathy, both of which underpinned his utopian vision of a new
humanism. Written with clarity and passion, Christopher J. Lee's
account ultimately argues for the pragmatic idealism of Frantz
Fanon and his continued importance today.
In April 1955, twenty-nine countries from Africa, Asia, and the
Middle East came together for a diplomatic conference in Bandung,
Indonesia, intending to define the direction of the postcolonial
world. Ostensibly representing two-thirds of the world’s
population, the Bandung conference occurred during a key moment of
transition in the mid-twentieth century—amid the global wave of
decolonization that took place after the Second World War and the
nascent establishment of a new Cold War world order in its wake.
Participants such as Jawaharlal Nehru of India, Gamal Abdel Nasser
of Egypt, Zhou Enlai of China, and Sukarno of Indonesia seized this
occasion to attempt the creation of a political alternative to the
dual threats of Western neocolonialism and the Cold War
interventionism of the United States and the Soviet Union. The
essays collected here explore the diverse repercussions of this
event, tracing diplomatic, intellectual, and sociocultural
histories that ensued as well as addressing the broader
intersection of postcolonial and Cold War history. With a new
foreword by Vijay Prashad and a new preface by the editor, Making a
World after Empire speaks to contemporary discussions of
decolonization, Third Worldism, and the emergence of the Global
South, thus reestablishing the conference’s importance in
twentieth-century global history. Contributors: Michael Adas, Laura
Bier, James R. Brennan, G. Thomas Burgess, Antoinette Burton,
Dipesh Chakrabarty, Julian Go, Christopher J. Lee, Jamie Monson,
Jeremy Prestholdt, and Denis M. Tull.
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Jet Lag (Paperback)
Christopher J Lee
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R344
R246
Discovery Miles 2 460
Save R98 (28%)
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books
about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Jet lag is a momentary
condition resulting from the human body and its inner clock being
pitched against the time-leaping effects of modern aviation. But
more than that, it is a situation that explains time, technology,
and the human body. Jet lag epitomizes the accelerated world we
live in. It makes the speed and discomfort of globalization
tangible on a personal level. Tracing physiological, temporal,
technological, and cultural meanings, Christopher J. Lee's Jet Lag
ponders our intrinsic human limits in the face of modern
innovation, revealing the latent costs of global cosmopolitanism
today. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay
series in The Atlantic.
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