Described as a prophet of the post-apartheid condition, Njabulo Ndebele is a prize-winning author, poet and critic and one of the leading lights in South Africa's literary world. These essays, beginning in 1984, were written over the storm years of the democratic struggle and are reprinted here with a new introduction by Graham Pechey.

A study of the work of writers from South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, Angola, Mozambique, and Namibia, and written at a time of crucial change in the subcontinent, this book covers a range of work, from the storytelling of stone-age Bushmen to modern writing by figures.

Njabulo S. Ndebele's essays on South African literature and culture initially appeared in various publications in the 1980s. They encompass a period of trauma, defiance, and change - the decade of the collapse of apartheid and the challenge of reconstructing a future. In 1991, the essays were collected under the current title of Rediscovery of the Ordinary: Essays on South African Literature and Culture. Here, this collection is reprinted without revision, together with an interview provoked by Albie Sachs' paper Preparing Ourselves for Freedom. That it is possible to republish the essays without revision so many years after their first appearance is a tribute to Ndebele's prescience. The issues that he raises and the questions that he poses remain key to a people who, after apartheid, have started to rediscover the complex ordinariness of living in a civil society.

The Columbia Guide to South African literature in English since 1945 Gareth Cornwell, Dirk Klopper and Craig MacKenzie This guide captures the pulsating diversity of South African literature in English since 1945 in a single volume, with a strong range of entries, richness of detail and critical sophistication. With some 400 entries on post-1945 writers, and a particular emphasis on writers emerging in the last 20 years or so, it is both comprehensive and concise on major writers and themes, and provides key background information on major historical and cultural events. The introduction provides a context for the entries, which include emerging writers, major post-1945 writers, and detailed subject entries. An appendix on some 30 essential pre-1945 writers ensures that the literary history is presented in a balanced way. The guide concludes with an extensive bibliography including primary works, critical literature, and anthologies, as well as a detailed index. From Afrika to Zwi, with Baderoon, Coovadia, and Duiker in between - not to mention Essop, Fugard, Galgut, Head, Jensma, Kozain, La Guma, Magona, Ndebele, Oliphant, Paton, Rampolokeng, Slovo, Themba, Uys, VladislaviÃ?Â, Wicomb, Zadok . . . this is the indispensible guide to South African literature in English.

Everyday life in South Africa has been dominated by the politics of racial identities, while such identities form and re-form around a range of cultural activities and practices. This book traces the important dimensions of cultural activity in late twentieth-century South Africa, offering a multidisciplinary assessment between culture and politics. It also explores the ways in which the place of culture is being rethought since South Africa's transition to democracy.

South Africa's unique history has produced literatures in many languages, in both oral and written forms, reflecting the diversity in the cultural histories and experiences of its people. The Cambridge History offers a comprehensive, multi-authored history of South African literature in all eleven official languages (and more minor ones) of the country, produced by a team of over forty international experts, including contributors from all of the major regions and language groups of South Africa. It will provide a complete portrait of South Africa's literary production, organised as a chronological history from the oral traditions existing before colonial settlement, to the post-apartheid revision of the past. In a field marked by controversy, this volume is more fully representative than any existing account of South Africa's literary history. It will make a unique contribution to Commonwealth, international and postcolonial studies and serve as a definitive reference work for decades to come.

An explanation of the unique role of the book and book collecting in South Africa due to the apartheid This book explores the power of print and the politics of the book in South Africa from a range of disciplinary perspectives- historical, bibliographic, literary-critical, sociological, and cultural studies. The essays collected here, by leading international scholars, address a range of topics as varied as: the role of print cultures in contests over the nature of the colonial public sphere in the nineteenth century; orthography; iimbongi, orature and the canon; book- collecting and libraries; print and transnationalism; Indian Ocean cosmopolitanisms; books in war; how the fates of South African texts, locally and globally, have been affected by their material instantiations; photocomics and other ephemera; censorship, during and after apartheid; books about art and books as art; local academic publishing; and the challenge of 'book history' for literary and cultural criticism in contemporary South Africa.