Search results for ""author stephen clingman""

Meticulous and finely crafted, this biography of Abram Fischer follows the South African lawyer’s journey of conscience and personal transformation. Born into one of the most prominent Afrikaner nationalist families, Fischer nevertheless made his name as an antiapartheid activist noted for his defense of antiapartheid figures in major trials, including Nelson Mandela. In 1966, he himself was sentenced to life imprisonment for his political activities. Before his sentencing he had spent nine months underground, in disguise, evading a nationwide manhunt. What had brought him to these circumstances? What led to his untimely death after nine years in prison? In answering these and other questions, this book delves into the lives of Fischer and his wife Molly and goes beyond them to examine more than 100 years of South African history, the courtroom drama of South Africa’s great political trials, and the political intrigue of the 1960s and beyond. Weaving the personal and public, Stephen Clingman’s biography is an account of tragedy and transcendence, showing how the miracle of South Africa’s transition to democracy was deeply connected to the legacy of Bram Fischer.

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The South African artist William Kentridge Hon RA was born in Johannesburg in 1955 and lives and works there to this day. He is internationally renowned for the expressionism of his work in numerous media, among them charcoal, printmaking, sculpture and film, as well as his acclaimed theatrical and operatic productions. As elusive as it is allusive, Kentridge’s art is shaped by apartheid and grounded in the politics of the post-apartheid era, and in science, literature and history, while always maintaining space for contradiction and uncertainty. In a brilliant exposition of Kentridge’s output, Stephen Clingman, Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, undertakes a series of enquiries, of walks around the artist and his practice, through the various layers and linkages, crossings and connections of his art. As he proceeds, he considers Kentridge’s themes, explores them and proceeds by association to others. Along the way, overlaps, thought-collages, allusions and assemblages come together to create a connective, dimensional way of thinking inspired by Kentridge’s own habits of creation.

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