Tag: Wits University Press

Reflections on race, language, colonial, postcolonial and decolonial knowledge projects that explore the pitfalls and possibilities that face South African universities and a post-apartheid generation inventing the future of knowledge.

The National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD) is a flagship South African public health organisation, and this book, by its first executive director and virologist Dr Barry Schoub, paints a portrait of its development, despite many challenges, towards becoming an internationally renowned partner in the struggle for global health.

A key study on writer and activist Keorapetse Kgositsile that presents a new approach to studying the radicalism of Africa and its diaspora, and makes a major contribution to the histories of Black lives, gender studies, jazz studies, politics, and creativity.

The book explores the experiences of transnational migrant families from Africa, including flows into and out of South Africa, and how technology is used to maintain kinship and duties of care from afar. This is the first book to capture the stories of transnational African families and their use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in mediating their experiences of migration and caring across distance.

Sithole problematises the signifier X, as a marker of the dehumanisation of the black subject. He argues that post-1994 South Africa retains the markers of its colonial past, and remains a territory of unfreedom for blacks. He offers a new imagination for a liberatory project through the idea of Azania as a site of true emancipation.

Drawing on a selection of ethnographic studies of precarious work in Africa, this book discusses globalisation and digitalisation as drivers for structural change and examines the implications for labour.

Multidisciplinary scholars showcase their search for decolonial strategies from within their disciplinary focus, covering ideas such as the different layers at which colonialism operates, strategies for a decolonisation that does not recolonise, and the importance of preserving and publishing in indigenous languages.

Political theorist Steven Friedman addresses how and why the current language around anti-Semitism in Israel has been distorted and weaponised to serve the political objectives of the Israeli state. Friedman’s critique examines what this implies for the fight against racism in South Africa and India, and in other parts of the world.

Working with key concepts developed by Gillian Hart, this book argues for a critical ethnographic approach to advance social justice movements for a radically different world. It offers an invaluable toolkit for activists and scholars engaged in sharpening their critical concepts for social and environmental change.

These Potatoes Look Like Humans critiques the narrow materialist and legalistic arguments about the land question to recognise that, for most black South Africans, the meanings of land and dispossession are linked with spirituality and being.