Alexandra Kollontai inspired generations of socialists in Russia with her pioneering views on sex and the family. A revolutionary activist and writer, she was the only woman in the first Bolshevik government in 1917. This second edition of Cathy Porter’s biography draws on newly-published memoirs, diaries and letters to offer fresh insights into Kollontai’s stormy political life. It tells of her fight for workers’ democracy and women’s rights, her love affairs, her disagreements with the Bolshevik party, and her last years ‘in exile’ as a Soviet diplomat in Norway, Mexico and Sweden.
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Purple Hibiscus is set in postcolonial Nigeria, a country beset by political instability and economic difficulties. The central character is Kambili Achike, aged fifteen for much of the period covered by the book, a member of a wealthy family dominated by her devoutly Catholic father, Eugene. Eugene is both a religious zealot and a violent figure in the Achike household, subjecting his wife Beatrice, Kambili herself, and her brother Jaja to beatings and psychological cruelty.
The story is told through Kambili’s eyes and is essentially about the disintegration of her family unit and her struggle to grow to maturity. A key period is the time Kambili and her brother spend at the house of her father’s sister, Ifeoma, and her three children. This household offers a marked contrast to what Kambili and Jaja are used to. It practices a completely different form of Catholicism, making for a happy, liberal place that encourages its members to speak their minds. In this nurturing environment, both Kambili and Jaja become more open and more able to voice their own opinions. While at Aunty Ifeoma’s, Kambili also falls in love with a young priest, Father Amadi, which awakens her sense of her own sexuality.
Purple Hibiscus is an exquisite novel about the emotional turmoil of adolescence, the powerful bonds of family, and the bright promise of freedom.
The Making of Babasaheb and the Dalit Movement
Trotsky’s theory of the permanent revolution is one of the most important additions to the arsenal of marxism. It was first developed by Trotsky in 1904, on the eve of the first Russian Revolution. At that time, all the tendencies of the Russian Social Democracy had the perspective of a bourgeois democratic revolution. Trotsky alone in 1905 put forward the idea that the Russian working class could come to power before the workers of Western Europe. The correctness of Trotsky’s theory was brilliantly demonstrated in 1917, when the Bolshevik Party under Lenin and Trotsky led the Russian proletariat to power in the first workers state in the world.
However, after the death of Lenin in 1924, the theory of the permanent revolution was subject to a vitriolic onslaught by the stalinist bureaucracy, which had in effect renounced world revolution in favour of “socialism in one country”. The attack on the theory came to epitomise the struggle against “Trotskyism”. Today, however, with the collapse of Stalinism (and with it “socialism in one country”), Trotsky’s theory of the permanent revolution has become more relevant than ever.
Publisher : Aakar Publications
Arrow of God is a 1964 novel by Chinua Achebe, his third. It followed his book Things Fall Apart. These two works, along with the third book, No Longer at Ease, are sometimes called The African Trilogy, as they share similar settings and themes. The novel centers on Ezeulu, the chief priest of several Igbo villages in Colonial Nigeria, who confronts colonial powers and Christian missionaries in the 1920s. The novel was published as part of the influential Heinemann African Writers Series.
The phrase “Arrow of God” is drawn from an Igbo proverb in which a person, or sometimes an event, is said to represent the will of God. Arrow of God won the first ever Jock Campbell/New Statesman Prize for African writing.
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