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A broad measure of the success of any scholarly publisher is its reputation in the wider scholarly publishing community, as well as among key stakeholder groups. In the first instance, the HSRC Press has certainly become the most productive publisher of scholarly works in South Africa and the rest of Africa. In the second instance, the Press is increasingly becoming a sought-after outlet for leading academic authors to publish and disseminate their work.
External peer-review processes are critical to ensuring the quality and scientific
New releases
Voices of Liberation Alex La Guma
The Exile Years: 1966-1985
About the book
Alex La Guma: The Exile Years, 1966-1985 revisits the exile writing of Alex La Guma (1925-1985), a canonical writer of South African literature during the apartheid era. An activist with the South African Communist Party, the South African Coloured People's Organisation, and the African National Congress, La Guma
published numerous works and served as Secretary General of the Afro-Asian Writers Association from 1979 until his death inn Havana, Cuba, in 1985. He posthumously received the Order of lkhamanga in Gold for his body of work in 2003.
Best known for his novels A Walk in the Night (1962) and In the Fog of the Seasons' End (1972), this new volume reveals a different side of La Guma by focusing on his non-fiction published from the time he left for exile in 1966 until his passing in 1985. During this extended period, he produced his most wide-ranging
political and cultural commentary, which engaged with African decolonisation, postcolonial Pan-African ism, Afro-Asianism, and Third World internationalism.
This new addition to the Voices of Liberation series serves as a mapping of La Guma's life, in addition to providing some of his key texts and insightful analyses of his important contributions. The book is divided into three broad categories: His Life in Exile, His Voice and Reflections on His Legacy.
Neglected no longer, Alex La Guma: The Exile Years, 1966-1985 restores La Guma's career and activism in exile, which exemplify the global parameters of the South African liberation struggle during the second half of the twentieth century.
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Poetic Inquiry for the Human and Social Sciences: Voices from the South and North
Voices from the South and North
About the book
Poetic Inquiry for the Human and Social Sciences: Voices from the South and North enriches human and social science research by introducing new voices, insights, and epistemologies. Poetic inquiry, or poetry as research, is a literary and performance arts-based approach. It combines the arts and humanities with scientific inquiry to enhance social research. By challenging conventional epistemological traditions that assert a detached stance of the known from the knower, poetic inquiry proposes a method of decolonising knowledge production. This book expands on ground-breaking work done in the Global North on transdisciplinary poetic inquiry scholarship by bringing it into conversation with knowledge from the Global South. It allows for South-North leadership and places unique scholarly contributions from the South at the centre of transnational discussions. In exploring and advancing poetic inquiry in the Global South, part of the book’s decolonising agenda is to challenge and expand the definition of poetic inquiry and recognise the contributions from diverse traditions and social practices. The peer-reviewed chapters are written by new and established scholars in various knowledge fields worldwide. The chapters’ scholarly contributions are complemented by an original poetry sequence interwoven through the book. Critically, Voices and Silences shows how poetry can engender innovative research that addresses pressing social justice issues, such as inclusion and decolonisation.
Poetic Inquiry will interest researchers and academics who seek to advance social research by adopting new epistemologies and approaches that integrate the value of the Global South’s contributions and foster expanded South-North collaborations.
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Transformative Leadership In African Contexts
Strategies for Social Change
About the book
The focus of transformative leadership is on changing power structures and dynamics in society such that people’s access to livelihoods, dignity, rights, and wellbeing are systemically ensured, rather than a focus on institutional or organisational change or individual engagements between leaders and followers. Transformative leadership takes as its unit of influence wider social, political and material issues. In the words of Archbishop Emeritus of Cape Town, Desmond Tutu “There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river and find out why they are falling in”.
Through a series of nuanced case studies, the authors set out how contemporary leaders on the African continent navigate complexity, chaos, struggle, temptation, controversy, and roadblocks, in a context that is both emerging from colonial exploitation and domination, and that suffers from a myriad of post-colonial ills and aspirations. Authors integrate past practices, considering the cultural heritages that animate action, the political heroes (and villains), and historical thinkers that have encouraged current leadership practices and warned against others. They also shine a spotlight on the many ways in which leadership challenges for the future are anticipated. These include the rapid social, technological, and cultural shifts, and struggles around gender, mobility, and commercial practices already sweeping the continent. Multiple essays offer markers for the way ahead for a new generation who must lead and find their own path to the future.
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Voices of Liberation: Samora Machel
Leader and Liberator in Southern Africa
Samora Machel was born in rural Mozambique in 1933 under Portuguese colonial rule and trained as a nurse but abandoned this career to join the fledgling liberation movement Frelimo. He rose through the ranks to become secretary of defence and later president of the movement in 1969. In 1974 he assumed the presidency of the new People's Republic of Mozambique.
In 1977 Frelimo formally adopted Marxist-Leninist ideology, and its policies focused on public health, mass literacy, and organising the rural population into collective forms of production. But first white-ruled Rhodesia, and then apartheid South Africa, supported a brutal anti-government rebellion that by the mid-1980s had spread across Mozambique and decimated it. In October 1986, returning from a summit in Zambia, his plane crashed in mysterious circumstances at Mbuzini in South Africa, killing him and most of his delegation.