Relocations
Reading culture in South Africa
Published on 31. January 2016
Book
Paperback/Softback
256 pages
978-1-77582-079-6 (ISBN)
Description
Between 2009 and 2012, the Gordon Institute for the Performing and Creative Arts in Cape Town held the Great Texts/Big Questions public lecture series which became a celebrated part of Cape Town's cultural landscape, demonstrating current intellectual and creative thinking in South Africa. These lectures gave audiences a chance to engage with transformative texts and questions, to hear thought leaders speak on the ideas, the books, the art, and the films that matter to them and to us.
Relocations: Reading Culture in South Africa brings together a selection of these lectures by world-renowned artists, writers and thinkers in the form of essays, for the benefit of a wider readership, with a contemporary design which plays with words. The authors range from novelists Andre Brink and Imraan Coovadia (one of the collection's editors), to poets Gabeba Baderoon and Rustum Kozain, to artist William Kentridge and social activist Zackie Achmat. The topics are as wide as Don Quixote, Marx and Lincoln, trout fishing, Hamlet, the 19th-century Russian writer Gogol and Nabokov's novel Lolita.
Today's readers are increasingly interested in finding new ways to understand and live with great texts and the world of ideas. Books like this demonstrate that thinking about these texts does not have to be an inaccessibly academic pursuit.
Relocations: Reading Culture in South Africa brings together a selection of these lectures by world-renowned artists, writers and thinkers in the form of essays, for the benefit of a wider readership, with a contemporary design which plays with words. The authors range from novelists Andre Brink and Imraan Coovadia (one of the collection's editors), to poets Gabeba Baderoon and Rustum Kozain, to artist William Kentridge and social activist Zackie Achmat. The topics are as wide as Don Quixote, Marx and Lincoln, trout fishing, Hamlet, the 19th-century Russian writer Gogol and Nabokov's novel Lolita.
Today's readers are increasingly interested in finding new ways to understand and live with great texts and the world of ideas. Books like this demonstrate that thinking about these texts does not have to be an inaccessibly academic pursuit.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Cape Town
South Africa
Dimensions
Height: 245 mm
Width: 168 mm
Thickness: 15 mm
Weight
500 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-77582-079-6 (9781775820796)
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Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Imraan Coovadia is a writer and director of the creative writing programme at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.
Alexandra Dodd is an independent writer and editor at the interface between literary and visual culture.
Coilin Parsons is Assistant Professor of English at Georgetown University, USA.
Alexandra Dodd is an independent writer and editor at the interface between literary and visual culture.
Coilin Parsons is Assistant Professor of English at Georgetown University, USA.
Content
Introduction: Reflections from the cracked looking glass - Imraan Coovadia, Alex Dodd, Coilin Parsons; The marvels of the ingenious knight Don Quixote de la Mancha - Andre Brink; Rereading Blake's lyric 'Never seek to tell thy love' - John Higgins; How Hamlet became modern - Sandra Young; These things do happen - William Kentridge; The process of Shembe music - Neo Muyanga; A page - Gabeba Baderoon, Rustum Kozain, Henrietta Rose-Innes; Haunted by waters - Duncan Brown; Syntactic structures: Noam Chomsky and the Colourless green revolution in language studies - Raj Mesthrie; The space between: Ways of looking at the art of Xu Bing - Peter McDonald; An inconvenient truth: Abraham Lincoln and Karl Marx - Zackie Achmat; W.E.B. du Bois's black reconstruction - Nicholas Mirzoeff; Gandhi's Hind Swaraj - Isabel Hofmeyr; Nothing extraordinary: E.M. Forster and the English limit - Hedley Twidle; How to read Lolita - Imraan Coovadia; The dead in the world: James Joyce's travelling text - Coilin Parsons.