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‘Editors K. Satyanarayana and Susie Tharu have drawn from their previous experience editing anthologies of Dalit writing from south India to collate poetry, essays, memoir and fiction into an immersive experience of Dalit literature as both aesthetic and socio-political identity.’— LiveMint
Read an excerpt published in the Hindustan Times.
The Motorcycle Diaries is a story which revolves around 2 men who embark on a road journey on a 1939 Norton 500cc cylinder motorcycle from Buenos Aires. They are out to discover and explore South America. This book had been written 8 years prior to the Cuban Revolution. The person who wrote the memoirs of this journey was one of those 2 bikers, Ernesto Guevara. He focused on the injustices that were prevalent at that time in South America.
‘Compelling, laudably unsentimental and deeply significant.’ — Frances Stonar Saunders, GuardianIn 1922, Lenin personally drew up a list of some 220 ‘undesirable’ intellectuals to be deported in preparation for the creation of the Soviet Union in December of that year. Two ships sailed from Petrograd that autumn, taking around 70 of these eminent men and their families away to what became permanent exile in Berlin, Prague and Paris. Using diaries, letters and memoirs, The Philosophy Steamer tells the story of the philosophers, writers, journalists and scholars thrown out of their homeland and forced to join migr communities. It also explores the fate of ideas: not just those of Lenin, but also of the men who, though forced to leave their homeland, made unique contributions to the cultural and intellectual life of the twentieth century.’Chamberlain movingly describes the experience of exile in ways that echo that great exile novelist Nabokov himself… a richly humane and complex book of enormous spiritual depth by a remarkably talented author.’ — Michael Burleigh, Sunday Telegraph
The shape of the beast is our world laid bare, with great courage, passion and eloquence, by a mind that has engaged unhesitatingly with its changing realities, often anticipating the way things have moved in the last decade in the fourteen interviews collected here, conducted between january 2001 and september 2008, arundhati roy examines the nature of state and corporate power as it has emerged during this period, and the shape that resistance movements are taking as she speaks, among other things, about people displaced by dams and industry, the genocide in gujarat, maoist rebels, the war in kashmir and the global war on terror, she raises fundamental questions about democracy, justice and non-violent protest unabashedly political, this is also a deeply personal collection through the conversations, arundhati talks about the necessity of taking a stand, as also the dilemma of guarding the private space necessary for writing in a world that demands urgent, unequivocal intervention and in the final interview, she discusses with uncommon candour her ambiguous feelings about success and both the pressures and the freedom that come with it
Stretcher-Bearer of Empire
In the pantheon of global liberation heroes, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi has pride of place. Leaders like Mandela have lauded him as being part of the epic battle to defeat the white regime and prepare the way for a non-racial country. A popular sentiment in South Africa goes: ‘India gave us Mohandas, and we returned him to you as Mahatma’.
Against this background, The South African Gandhi: Stretcher-Bearer of Empire unravels the complex story of a man who, throughout his stay on African soil (1893–1914), remained true to Empire while expressing disdain for Africans. For Gandhi, whites and Indians were bound by an Aryan bloodline that had no place for the African. His racism was matched by his class (and caste) prejudice towards the Indian indentured. He persistently claimed that they were ignorant and needed his leadership, and wrote their struggles out of history—struggles this book documents.
The authors show that Gandhi never missed an opportunity to demonstrate his loyalty to Empire, with a particular penchant for war. He served as stretcher-bearer in the war between Brit and Boer, demanded that Indians be allowed to carry fire-arms, and recruited volunteers for the imperial army in both England and India during the First World War.
Ashwin Desai is Professor of Sociology at the University of Johannesburg. His previous books include South Africa: Still Revolting, ‘We are the Poors’: Community Struggles in Post-Apartheid South Africa and Reading Revolution: Shakespeare on Robben Island among others.
Goolam Vahed is Associate Professor of History at the University of KwaZulu Natal. He writes on histories of migration, ethnicity, religion, and identity formation among Indian South Africans.
The Wretched of the Earth (French: Les Damnés de la Terre) is a 1961 book by Frantz Fanon, in which the author provides a psychiatric and psychologic analysis of the dehumanizing effects of colonization upon the individual and the nation, and discusses the broader social, cultural, and political implications inherent to establishing a social movement for the decolonization of a person and of a people. The French-language title derives from the opening lyrics of “The Internationale”.
In 1952 Alberto Granado, a young doctor, and his friend Ernesto Guevara, a 23- year- old medical student from a distinguished Buenos Aires family decided to explore their continent. They set off from Cordoba in Argentina on a 1949 Norton 500cc motorbike and travelled through Chile, Peru, Colombia and Venezuela. They worked as casual labourers along the way, as football coaches, medical assistants, and haulage hands. The poverty and exploitation of the native population changed them for ever. Each man later wrote an account of the journey. Alberto Granado realised later in his life that what they saw and encountered on their journey represented a crucial turning point. It strengthened Alberto’s determination to forge his career as a scientist. And it started the process that was to turn Ernesto- the debonair, fun- loving student- into Che, the man who fought for the liberation of Cuba and became the heroic and glamorous warrior fighting for freedom and social justice, who remains to this day in people’s minds Latin America’s foremost hero and one of the world’s great revolutionaries. A companion to Che’s Motorcycle Diaries, Alberto Granado’s book is a moving and at times hilarious account of how two carefree young men found their true purpose in life.
‘To be sure, When Google Met WikiLeaks is a vital book, an admirably direct and clear-eyed attempt to make sense of the modern-day privacy and freedom of speech debates’—The Sunday Guardian
‘For those interested to know how present-day geopolitics, surveillance, censorship and publishing (if not foreign policy itself) are being shaped by the gods of the internet, this is recommended reading’—The Telegraph
‘In When Google Met Wikileaks, Assange makes a case for the dark net by suggesting that the open web site we all know best has sinister intentions’—The Independent
‘The most important accomplishment of the book may be the connection Assange establishes between the Google Politic and the ambitions set loose in Digital Age’—Prague Post
