Search results for ""Author James Currey""

1959 was the year James Currey arrived in South Africa and found a nation in crisis. Hopes of change rose and foundered over the next five years. Letters and vivid conversations capture the excitement of daily life and political drama. The extra-parliamentary opposition had used non-violent means of protest since 1952, but on 21 March 1960 the police shot and killed 69 peaceful protesters in Sharpeville. It was a turning point. In March 1960 some 35,000 Africans protested on Cape Town and the police responded with further savagery. Shortly after Randolph Vigne, Neville Rubin, Tim Holmes and James Currey founded The New African a radical review of politics and the arts. The intense comings and goings of a small magazine served as effective cover for acts of sabotage. In July 1964 Randolph Vigne appealed to Clare and James to enable him escape. Clare had no hesitation; ‘Randolph and Gillian are our friends’, she said. James used his British passport, to buy a ticket on a Norwegian freighter so that Vigne could travel to Montreal. Two days later Clare and James flew out of Johannesburg.

Read more less

In 2012 the African Writers Series celebrated its 50th anniversary. Africa Writes Back tells the publishing story behind some of the books and authors in the series. Africa Writes Back was published in 2008 to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the publication of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart - the novel which provided the impetus for the foundation of the Heinemann African Writers Series in 1962 with Chinua Achebe as the Editorial Adviser. With the 60th anniversary of the AWS being celebrated in 2022, James Currey's book has a new resonance. '... not only the story of a publishing enterprise of great significance; it is also a large part of the story of African literature and its dissemination in the latter half of the twentieth century. The manuscript is full of the drama of that enterprise, the drama of dealing with the mother house, William Heinemann, of dealing with the often intractable political constraints dominating the intellectual space across Africa, and not least of all dealing with the writers themselves - with their ambitions,their temperaments, their financial needs and, at time, their perception of a colonial relationship between themselves and a European publishing house.' - Clive Wake, Emeritus Professor of Modern Languages, University of Kent at Canterbury. North America: Ohio U Press; Ghana: Sub-Saharan Publishers; South Africa: Wits U Press; Nigeria: HEBN; Kenya: EAEP; Zimbabwe: Weaver Press

Read more less

Examines war and the impact of warfare on identity formation in Ethiopia. Images of war, narratives of suffering and notions of ethnicity are intrinsically linked to Western perceptions of Africa. Filtered through a mostly international media the information of African wars is confined to narrow categories of explanation emerging from and adapted to a Western history and political culture. This book aims at reversing this process; to look at war and suffering from the point of view of those who fight it and suffer through it. Indoing so it reveals that the simplistic models explaining contemporary wars in Africa which are reproduced in a Western discourse are basically false. This book examines the understanding of war and the impact of warfare onthe formation and conceptualisation of identities in Ethiopia. Building on historical trajectories of enemy images, the recent Eritean-Ethiopian war [1998-2000] is used as an empirical backdrop to explore war's formative impact, by analysing politics of identity and shifting perceptions of enemies and allies. KJETIL TRONVOLL is Professor in Human Rights, Peace and Conflict Studies at the Norwegian Centre for Human Rights, University of Oslo. Hisother publications include Brothers at War: Making Sense of the Eritrean-Ethiopian War (co-author; James Currey/Ohio University Press, 2000) and The Ethiopian Red Terror Trials: Transitional Justice Challenged (co-editor; James Currey 2009) .

Read more less