Academic

‘I didn’t seem to exist. It felt easier that way’—Es’kia Mphahlele. Read an excerpt from Like Family: Domestic Workers in South African History and Literature

The JRB presents an extract from Like Family: Domestic Workers in South African History and Literature, by Ena Jansen. Like…

Academic

Dry like steel: A wrecking ball of a book—Wamuwi Mbao reviews Adam Habib’s Rebels and Rage: Reflecting on #FeesMustFall

Wamuwi Mbao reviews Rebels and Rage: Reflecting on #FeesMustFall by Adam Habib, finding it engrossing, but ultimately unconvincing. Rebels and Rage: Reflecting on #FeesMustFall…

Academic

‘A literary con’—Hedley Twidle rereads Familiarity is the Kingdom of the Lost by Dugmore Boetie, the joker in the pack of Sophiatown-era life writing

In this excerpt from his forthcoming book on non-fiction in South African literature, Experiments with Truth, Hedley Twidle revisits Dugmore…

Academic

[The JRB Daily] Commemorate Human Rights Day with an exclusive excerpt from Lie on Your Wounds: The Prison Correspondence of Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe

Header image: Book cover (left); and Sobukwe, inside the grounds of Orlando Police Station, awaiting arrest, on the morning of 21…

Academic

[Conversation Issue] ‘Intersectionality seems so blindingly obvious a notion’—Zoë Wicomb in conversation with Andrew van der Vlies, from their new book Race, Nation, Translation

As part of our January Conversation Issue, we present an excerpted interview from a new collection of Zoë Wicomb’s writing, Race,…

Academic

[The JRB Daily] [World Aids Day] Two Koos Prinsloo short stories translated into English for the first time—among the first fictional texts about HIV/Aids in South Africa

In The JRB’s forthcoming Fiction Issue, we will feature two short stories by Koos Prinsloo, published for the first time…

Academic

The 2018 Sol Plaatje Lecture: Kole Omotoso on The Power of Politics, the Power of Literatures—Sol Plaatje and the Madness of Making Humanity Shudder

This year’s Annual Sol Plaatje Lecture was delivered on 17 October at Sol Plaatje University, Kimberley, by Professor Kole Omotoso….

Academic

The Durban Riots and an ‘ambitious re-examination’ of the relationship between Africans and Indians–Alex Lichtenstein reviews Jon Soske’s Internal Frontiers

By recentering the narrative on Durban and Natal, rather than Johannesburg and the Transvaal, Jon Soske modifies the established account…

Academic

Decolonisation is generating your own knowledge and understandings: Tawana Kupe discusses the new Wits-based African Centre for the Study of the United States

The African Centre for the Study of the United States (ACSUS), a new research centre based at Wits University, Johannesburg,…