Books

The Class of ‘44’, the founders of the African National Congress Youth League (CYL) in 1944, includes a remarkable list of names: Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Oliver Tambo, Anton Lembede, and Ashby Peter (A.P.) Mda. While much has been written on the others, relatively little attention has been paid to Mda, the Youth League president from 1947 to 1947 whom his peers regarded as the foremost political intellectual and strategist of their generation.

Steve Biko was not only considered a `brilliant political theorist' but is also considered a formidable and articulate philosopher'. However, Biko is not simply and merely a philosopher in the manner in which Immanuel Kant was a philosopher, but a philosopher of a special kind, an important Africana existential philosopher.

In this book author Kgomotso Michael Masemola uses Gilles Deleuze’s theories of immanence and deterritorialization to explore South African autobiography as both the site and the limit of intertextual cultural memory.

The authors in this volume explore the interconnected issues of intergenerational trauma and traumatic memory in societies with a history of collective violence across the globe. Each chapter’s discussion offers a critical reflection on historical trauma and its repercussions and how memory can be used as a basis for dialogue and transformation.