Description
Book SynopsisParadise Lost. Race and Racism in Post-apartheid South Africa is about the continuing salience of race and persistence of racism in post-apartheid South Africa. The chapters in the volume illustrate the multiple ways in which race and racism are manifested and propose various strategies to confront racial inequality, racism and the power structure that underpins it, while exploring, how, through a renewed commitment to a non-racial society, apartheid racial categories can be put under erasure at exactly the time they are being reinforced.
Trade Review[...] Paradise Lost is an essential read for understanding South Africa’s inextricable and heartbreaking entanglement with its deep history of racist colonial and apartheid systems. Throughout each book chapter, each author strives to outline solutions or ways forward within their particular sites of research—from the possibilities and limits of Ubuntu and decoloniality (citing Ndlovy-Gatsheni), to calls for African knowledge production and raciolinguistic decolonial thinking, to the necessity of radical democratic politics. These essays culminate in Modimowarbarwa Kanyane’s thoughtful elaborations of the ways South Africans need to work towards decolonizing both white and black minds to create substantive equality, social justice, and national reconciliation. The strength of this collection, however, is in giving us the realities of both past and present as a platform for reimagining what South Africa could be. Ultimately, the paradox that Paradise Lost reveals is that South Africa must think with race in mind or the country will never move through or beyond racism. Kathryn Mathers, Duke University, in Research Africa Reviews Vol. 7 No. 1, April 2023, pp. 60-63
