Contributors to Volume 24, No. 1

Franco Barchiesi

Franco Barchiesi is Assistant Professor in the Department of African American and African Studies at Ohio State University. His research interests are in the study of African labor movements, with particular regard to Southern Africa, in relation to changing forms of employment, collective identities, civil society, social movements, social policy, and social citizenship. He has edited (with Tom Bramble) a book on Rethinking the Labour Movement in the ‘New South Africa’ (2003).

Patrick Bond

An academic at the University of KwaZulu-Natal Centre for Civil Society, Patrick Bond studied at Johns Hopkins under David Harvey, and moved to South Africa in 1990. His books include Elite Transition, Unsustainable South Africa, Against Global Apartheid, Talk Left Walk Right and most recently, Climate Change, Carbon Trading and Civil Society.

Dennis Brutus

One of the first South African poets to be widely read in Europe and the U.S., Dennis Brutus’s work found early critical acclaim. His first book, Sirens, Knuckles, Boots, was published while he was imprisoned for defying a “banning” order by the apartheid government following his campaign to desegregate the South African Olympic team. His best-known book, Letters to Martha, deals with his prison experiences. After being shot in the back by Johannesburg police during an escape attempt and breaking rocks for 18 months at the notorious Robben Island prison alongside Nelson Mandela, Brutus was exiled in 1966, and in London resumed simultaneous careers as a poet and anti-apartheid campaigner. He was instrumental in achieving the apartheid regime’s expulsion from the Olympics, won numerous awards for poetry, and helped organize key African writers’ organizations with his colleagues Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe. Upon moving to the U.S., Brutus served in several academic positions, including at Northwestern University and the University of Pittsburgh, defeating efforts by the Reagan Administration to deport him. Following the transition to democracy in South Africa, Brutus has remained active with grassroots social movements in his home country and internationally. In the late 1990s he became a pivotal figure in the global justice movement and a featured speaker each year at the World Social Forum. In the anti-racism, reparations, and economic justice movements, he continues to serve as a leading strategist, working closely with international networks such as the Jubilee anti-debt movement. In South Africa, he has been a key figure in the Social Movements Indaba. In Southern Africa, he has traveled widely and has numerous contacts within the region’s social justice movements. He is an Honorary Professor at the Centre for Civil Society, University of KwaZulu-Natal, in Durban.

Ashwin Desai

Ashwin Desai is based at the Centre for Sociological Research, University of Johannesburg. He is closely involved with the resurgent social movements in South Africa and has written a book about these developments entitled ‘We are the Poors’: Community Struggles in Post-Apartheid South Africa (2002). His latest book, co-authored with Goolam Vahed, is Inside Indenture: A South African Story 1860-1914 (2007).

Pier Paolo Frassinelli

Pier Paolo Frassinelli teaches Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies at Monash University, South Africa campus.

Shane Graham

Shane Graham is an Associate Professor of English at Utah State University, and was formerly a Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. He is the author of South African Literature after the Truth Commission: Mapping Loss (2009).

Ulrike Kistner

Ulrike Kistner teaches in the Department of Classics and World Languages at the University of South Africa in Pretoria. The fields of her teaching and research include aesthetic, literary, and political theory; psychoanalysis and narrative; (trans)nationalism and cosmopolitanism; and human rights in postcoloniality. She has published a book, Commissioning and Contesting Post-Apartheid Human Rights: HIV-AIDS-Racism-Truth and Reconciliation, and numerous articles on these and related subjects.

Dale T. McKinley

Dale T. McKinley is an independent writer, researcher and lecturer based in Johannesburg. He is a long time socialist political activist and has been intricately involved in the South African left since the late 1980s. He is the author of The ANC and the Liberation Struggle: A Critical Political Biography (1997) and, with Ahmed Veriava, Arresting Dissent: State Repression and Post-Apartheid Social Movements (2004). He has also written numerous research reports, book chapters, journal and press articles on South African and international political, social, and economic issues.

Kelwyn Sole

Kelwyn Sole was born in Johannesburg in 1951 and was educated at the Universities of the Witwatersrand and London. He worked in Johannesburg, Botswana, and Namibia in a variety of jobs, and is currently Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Cape Town. He has published numerous articles, reviews, and polemics, mainly on South African culture and literature, as well as postcolonial and Marxist cultural theory, and is the author of five collections of poetry, the most recent of which is Land Dreaming: Prose Poems (2006).

Imre Szeman

Imre Szeman is Professor of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. Recent books include the second edition of Popular Culture: A User’s Guide (2009) and Canadian Cultural Studies: A Reader (2009).