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9780252084829 Academic Inspection Copy

Grounds of Engagement

Apartheid-Era African-American and South African Writing
  • ISBN-13: 9780252084829
  • Publisher: UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
    Imprint: UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
  • By Stephane Robolin
  • Price: AUD $43.99
  • Stock: 0 in stock
  • Availability: This book is temporarily out of stock, order will be despatched as soon as fresh stock is received.
  • Local release date: 14/10/2019
  • Format: Paperback 256 pages Weight: 0g
  • Categories: Sociology [JHB]
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Part literary history, part cultural study, Grounds of Engagement examines the relationships and exchanges between black South African and African American writers who sought to create common ground throughout the antiapartheid era. Stéphane Robolin argues that the authors' geographic imaginations crucially defined their individual interactions and, ultimately, the literary traditions on both sides of the Atlantic. Subject to the tyranny of segregation, authors such as Richard Wright, Bessie Head, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Keorapetse Kgositsile, Michelle Cliff, and Richard Rive charted their racialized landscapes and invented freer alternative geographies. They crafted rich representations of place to challenge the stark social and spatial arrangements that framed their lives. Those representations, Robolin contends, also articulated their desires for black transnational belonging and political solidarity. The first book to examine U.S. and South African literary exchanges in spatial terms, Grounds of Engagement identifies key moments in the understudied history of black cross-cultural exchange and exposes how geography serves as an indispensable means of shaping and reshaping modern racial meaning.
""St+¬phane Robolin has brilliantly taken his cue from the geographical and race-laden correspondence between Langston Hughes and Richard Rive to forge an expansive reading of literary relationships and artistic texts. Reading spaces of cultural synergy and mapping transnational black imaginaries, he expertly brings together the social, cultural, and physical geography of South African and African American writers during the era of segregation and apartheid. Within a dual focus on literary history and racial history, he skillfully navigates the complex intellectual terrain of under-explored artistic networks and linked geographies and does so with a superb mastery of cultural theory and spatial theory. The rewarding result in Grounds of Engagement is substantial grounds for celebration; it is a cutting edge scholarship and a major contribution to transnational and global studies.""--Thadious M. Davis, author of Southscapes: Geographies of Race, Region, and Literature
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