Tag: Wits University Press

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?

What happens when a former liberation movement turned political party loses its dominance but survives because no opposition party is able to succeed it? The trends are established: South Africa’s African National Congress (ANC) is in decline. Its hegemony has been weakened, its legitimacy diluted.

Social scientist Archie Mafeje, who was born in the Eastern Cape but lived most of his scholarly life in exile, was one of Africa’s most prominent intellectuals. This ground breaking book is the first to consider the entire body of Mafeje’s oeuvre and offers much needed engagement with his ideas.

This collection offers a new theory of the public sphere. The notion that societies mediate issues through certain kinds of engagement is at the heart of the democratic project and often centres on an imagined public sphere where this takes place.

The dominant news media is often accused of reflecting an ‘elite bias’, privileging and foregrounding the interests of a small segment of society, while ignoring the narratives of the majority. Tell Our Story investigates the problem of disproportionate media representation and offers a hands-on demonstration of listening journalism and research in practice to promote a more active engagement between journalists and local communities.

This timely book analyses the crisis and chaos of journalism in contemporary South Africa at a period when the media and their role are frequently at the centre of public debate. The transition to digital news has been messy, random and unpredictable.

BRICS is a grouping of the five major emerging economies of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. Volume five in the Democratic Marxism series challenges the mainstream understanding of BRICS and US dominance to situate the new global rivalries engulfing capitalism.

For more than a century, skin lighteners have been a ubiquitous feature of global popular culture embraced by consumers even as they were fiercely opposed by medical professionals, consumer health advocates, and anti-racist thinkers and activists.

Knowledge and Global Power is a ground-breaking international study which examines how knowledge is produced, distributed and validated globally. The former imperial nations – the rich countries of Europe and North America – still have a hegemonic position in the global knowledge economy.

Shortly after the giant bronze statue of Cecil John Rhodes came down at the University of Cape Town, student protesters called for the decolonisation of universities. It was a word hardly heard in South Africa’s struggle lexicon and many asked: What exactly is decolonisation?