Isabel Hofmeyr is Professor of African Literature at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and Visiting Distinguished Global Professor in the English Department of New York University. Her most recent book is Gandhi’s Printing Press: Experiments in Slow Reading (Harvard University Press, 2013). Along with Antoinette Burton she edited Ten Books That Shaped the British Empire: Creating an Imperial Commons (Duke University Press, 2014).
Isabel Hofmeyr
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Writing on Public Books
B-Sides: Bessie Head’s “The Collector of Treasures”
South African literature has long struggled to become drought-resistant: its plotlines, and even its paper production, presuppose abundant water.[none-for-homepage]
B-Sides: Dambudzo Marechera’s “The House of Hunger”
Contemporary southern Africa is littered with the detritus of grand schemes—imperialism, apartheid, development, independence, socialism. Wrought first by colonial violence and then by anti-colonial movements gone bad, the wreckages of utopia heap up in Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Angola, and South Africa. The fallout of these schemes accumulates and compacts. Citizens find themselves making their lives on […]
Gandhi in Africa
The title of this biography, Gandhi Before India, glances backwards and forwards. It invokes Ramachandra Guha’s previous blockbuster India After Gandhi and suggests a likely title—Gandhi After India—for volume two of the Mahatma’s life story. Gandhi, India, before, after: these titles quadrate nation and leader, time and space—a rather tame-looking matrix perhaps but one that […]
