WINNER OF THE 2021 ALA BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD - SCHOLARSHIP THE AUTHOR USES THE IMAGE OF BLOOD UNDER THE SKIN AS A WAY OF UNDERSTANDING CULTURAL AND LITERARY FORMS IN CONTEMPORARY SOUTH AFRICA. CHAPTERS DEAL WITH THE BLOODIED HISTORIES OF APARTHEID AND BLOOD AS TROPE FOR TALKING ABOUT CHANGE. In this book the author argues that a younger generation of South Africans is developing important and innovative ways of understanding South African pasts, and that challenge the narratives that have over the last decades been informed by notions of forgiveness and reconciliation. The author uses the image of history-rich blood to explore these approaches to intergenerational memory. Blood under the skin is a carrier of embodied and gendered histories andusing this image, the chapters revisit older archives, as well as analyse contemporary South African cultural and literary forms. The emphasis on blood challenges the privileged status skin has had as explanatory category inthinking about identity, and instead emphasises intergenerational transfer and continuity. The argument is that a younger generation is disputing and debating the terms through which to understand contemporary South Africa, as well as for interpreting the legacies of the past that remain under the visible layer of skin. The chapters each concern blood: Mandela's prison cell as laboratory for producing bloodless freedom; the kinship relations created and resisted in accounts of Eugene de Kock in prison; Ruth First's concern with information leaks in her accounts of her time in prison; the first human-to-human heart transplant and its relation to racialised attempts to salvage whiteidentity; the #Fallist moment; Abantu book festival; and activist scholarship and creative art works that use blood as trope for thinking about change and continuity. Carli Coetzee is Editor of the _Journal of African Cultural Studies_. Her publications include: _Accented Futures: Language Activism and the Ending of Apartheid _(Wits University Press, 2013) and the edited collection _Afropolitanism: Reboot_ (Routledge, 2017). She co-edited _The Handbook of African Literature_ (Routledge, 2019) with Moradewun Adejunmobi and _Negotiating the Past: The Making of Memory in South Africa_(Oxford University Press, 1998) with Sarah Nuttall. Southern Africa (South Africa, Namibia, Lesotho, Zimbabwe and Swaziland): Wits University Press