Search results for ""Author N. Chabani Manganyi""
Wits University Press Bury Me at the Marketplace: Es'kia Mphahlele and Company. Letters 1943-2006
When Chabani Manganyi published the first edition of selected letters twenty-five years ago as a companion volume to ""Exiles and Homecomings: A Biography of Es'kia Mphahlele"", the idea of Mphahlele's death was remote and poetic. The title, ""Bury Me at the Marketplace"", suggested that immortality of a kind awaited Mphahlele, in the very coming and going of those who remember him and whose lives he touched. It suggested, too, the energy and magnanimity of Mphahlele the man, whose personality and intellect as a writer and educator would carve an indelible place for him in South Africa's public sphere. That death has now come and we mourn it. Manganyi's words at the time have acquired a new significance: in the symbolic marketplace, he noted, 'the drama of life continues relentlessly and the silence of death is unmasked for all time'. The silence of death is certainly unmasked in this volume, in its record of Mphahlele's rich and varied life: his private words, his passions and obsessions, his arguments, his loves, hopes, achievements, and yes, even some of his failures. Here the reader will find many facets of the private man translated back into the marketplace of public memory. Despite the personal nature of the letters, the further horizons of this volume are the contours of South Africa's literary and cultural history, the international affiliations out of which it has been formed, particularly in the diaspora that connects South Africa to the rest of the African continent and to the black presence in Europe and the United States. This selection of Mphahlele's own letters has been greatly expanded; it has also been augmented by the addition of letters from Mphahlele's correspondents, among them such luminaries as Langston Hughes and Nadine Gordimer. It seeks to illustrate the networks that shaped Mphahlele's personal and intellectual life, the circuits of intimacy, intellectual inquiry, of friendship, scholarship and solidarity that he created and nurtured over the years. The letters cover the period from November 1943 to April 1987, forty-four of Mphahlele's mature years and most of his active professional life. The correspondence is supplemented by introductory essays from the two editors, by two interviews conducted with Mphahlele by Manganyi and by Attwell's insightful explanatory notes.
£41.60
Wits University Press Being Black in the World
N. Chabani Manganyi is one of South Africa’s most eminent intellectuals and an astute social and political observer of his time. He has had a distinguished career in psychology, education and in government, and has written widely on subjects relating to ethno-psychiatry, autobiography, black artists and race.Being-Black-in-the-World, one of his first publications, was written in 1973 at a time of global socio-political change and renewed resistance to the brutality of apartheid rule, including the Durban strikes of 1973 and the emergence of Black Consciousness. Publication of the book was delayed until the young Manganyi had left the country (to study at Yale University) as his publishers feared that the apartheid censorship board and security forces would prohibit him from leaving the country, and perhaps even incarcerate him, for being a ‘radical revolutionary’. Like Fanon in Black Skins, White Masks, Manganyi expressed the vileness of the racist order and its effect on the human condition.While the essays in this book are clearly situated in the material and social conditions of that time, they also have a timelessness that speaks to our contemporary concerns regarding black subjectivity, affectivity and corporeality; the persistence of a racial (and racist) order; and the possibilities of a renewed de-colonial project. Each of these short essays can be read as self-contained reflections on what it meant to be black during the apartheid years. At the same time, Manganyi weaves a tight and interconnected argument that gives the book a quiet cohesiveness. He is a master of understatement, and yet this does not stop him from making incisive political criticisms of black subjugation under apartheid. The essays will reward close study for anyone trying to make sense of black subjectivity and the persistence of white insensitivity to black suffering. Ahead of its time, the ideas in this book are an exemplary demonstration of what a thoroughgoing and rigorous de-colonial critique should entail.
£23.04
