South Africa in the Global Imaginary, edited by Leon de Kock, Louise Bethlehem & Sonja Laden (used)

South Africa in the Global Imaginary is an award-winning collection of essays about culture and identity from the perspective of post-apartheid South Africa. When it was first published as a special issue of the prestigious theory journal Poetics Today, the collection was named Best Special Issue of 2001 by the Council of Editors of Learned Journals, a body affiliated with the Modern Languages Association (MLA). The judges had the following to say about the collection:

'What finally characterises the best.. is a publishing design that... brings together a community of scholars... [and that] realises the potential of a publishing project, as opposed to good topics which did not mature significantly beyond a proceedings collection... Instead of the usual tactic of canonising a national or regional literature, or taking the measure of an existing tradition, this collection sets up a dialectic between South Africa's impossibly heterogeneous literary tradition, and its position as a literary/cultural symbol in Europe and the First World. Instead of making the job even more impossible, this somehow clarifies the peculiar multidirectional traffic that makes the question of South African culture a matter of global interest.'

In addition to the essays in the original collection, this volume, contains a new essay by David Attwell on the experimental turn in black South African fiction.

Condition: good