Dreaming of Freedom in South Africa Literature Between Critique and Utopia
Produktdetaljer
Biografisk notat
David Johnson is Professor of Literature in the Department of English and Creative Writing at The Open University. He is the author of Shakespeare and South Africa (1996), Imagining the Cape Colony: History, Literature and the South African Nation (2012) and Dreaming of Freedom in South Africa: Literature between Critique and Utopia (2019); and the co-editor of A Historical Companion to Postcolonial Literatures in English (2008); The Book in Africa: Critical Debates (2015); and Labour Struggles in Southern Africa (2023). He is the General Editor of the Edinburgh University Press series Key Texts in Anti-Colonial Thought.Johnson’s innovative, meticulously-researched book, full of surprises, explores South Africa’s marginalized literary and political traditions, thus enriching our understanding of the freedom struggle in all its complexity and diversity.
Allison Drew, University of York and University of Cape Town
By analysing a wide variety of political and literary texts, this study exposes the dead ends of liberal ideology and recovers alternative traditions of Marxism and working class struggle written out of nationalist and Stalinist historiography.
Benita Parry, University of Warwick
Professor Johnson’s book is rigorous, analytical, closely-argued, and almost forensic in its interrogation of a chosen collection of South Africa’s ‘literary dreams and political visions’.
- Bill Nasson, LitNet
Johnson’s book constitutes a benchmark for the history of freedom in South Africa and offers a refreshing conceptual and intellectual analysis of the South African left.
- Kasper Braskén, Abo Akademi University, Twentieth Century Communism
Johnson’s book constitutes a benchmark for the history of freedom in South Africa and offers a refreshing conceptual and intellectual analysis of the South African left.
- Kasper Braskén, Abo Akademi University, Twentieth Century Communism