Voices of Liberation Alex La Guma

The Exile Years: 1966-1985 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.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Note on Editing and Selection

Timeline

His Life in Exile

His Voice

Part I. Political Worlds

Part II. Cultural Scenes and Arguments

Part III. Literary Criticism and the Writing Life

Part IV. Five Stories and One Play

Part V. Interviews and Memoir

Reflections on His Legacy

Select Bibliography

About the Editor

Christopher J. Lee has held academic appointments at institutions in Africa, Asia, and North America. He most recently served as Professor of African History, World History, and African Literature at The Africa Institute, Sharjah, UAE. He is also a Non-Resident Fellow of the W. E. B. Du Bois Research Institute at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, Harvard University.

He has published seven books, including Making a World after Empire: The Bandung Moment and Its Political Afterlives (2010, rev. 2nd edition 2019), Unreasonable Histories: Nativism, Multiracial Lives, and the Genealogical Imagination in British Africa (2014), Frantz Fanon: Toward a Revolutionary Humanism (2015), and Kwame Anthony Appiah (2021). He received his PhD in history from Stanford University.