Fighting Words: Fifteen Books that Shaped the Postcolonial World
January 2017
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Book
Can a book change the world? Fighting Words looks at how the book has fuelled resistance to empire in the long twentieth century.
Literary Criticism
Freedom Fighter/Postcolonial Saint: The Symbolic Legacy of Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom (1994)
January 2017
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Chapter
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Fighting Words: Fifteen Books that Shaped the Postcolonial World
This chapter explores the influence of Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom (1994), placing the autobiography within the context of the global Mandela phenomenon. Focusing on the symbolic function of Mandela’s life story, which was concretized by the autobiography but taken up in multiple media and disseminated widely both in South Africa and globally, the chapter examines the shaping of Mandela as an embodiment of racial reconciliation. Mandela was a figure of hope embraced by the global media and rendered a postcolonial saint at the end of a cataclysmic century in which the history of decolonization represented but one disappointing utopian project among many. The chapter suggests that, while the African-centred humanism outlined in Long Walk to Freedom held radical resistant potential, Mandela’s value as a symbol proved equally available to conservative uses. This ambivalent legacy is being increasingly contested in South Africa.
Literary Criticism
The work of nostalgia in Denis Hirson’s <i>I Remember King Kong (The Boxer)</i>
December 2016
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Journal article
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English in Africa
Through a Sheet of Glass: The Ethics of Reading in Peter Carey'sOscar and Lucinda