Wits University Press

Latest titles

Guerrilla Radios in Southern Africa

Guerrilla Radios in Southern Africa is a collection of essays on the histories of the different radios of the liberation movements in the region during the era of the armed struggle. ...
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Out of The Dark Night

In Out of the Dark Night, Achille Mbembe offers a rich analysis of the paradoxes of the postcolonial moment that points toward new liberatory models of community, humanity and planetarity. He eruditely ranges across European and African thought to provide a powerful assessment of common ways of writing and thinking about Africa. ...
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Bats of Southern and Central Africa

This revised edition of a book first published in 2010 supplements the original account of the 116 bat species then known to be found in Southern and Central Africa with an additional eight newly described species. ...
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Anxious Joburg

Anxious Joburg focuses on Johannesburg, the largest and wealthiest city in South Africa, as a case study for the contemporary Global South city. Global South cities are often characterised as sites of contradiction and difference that produce a range of feelings around anxiety. How does it feel to live in the metropolis of Johannesburg: what are the conditions, intersections, affects and e ...
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The Social and Political Thought of Archie Mafeje

This comprehensive treatment of Archie Mafeje as a prominent African thinker, social scientist and researcher analyses his overall scholarship in the social sciences, his thinking on land and agrarian issues and his role as a theoretician of liberation and revolutionary theory. ...
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Violence, Slavery and Freedom between Hegel and Fanon

The essays in this collection offer close readings of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, and of responses to it in the work of twentieth-century philosophers, that highlight the entangled history of the translations, transpositions and transformations of Hegel in the work of Fanon, and more generally in colonial, postcolonial and decolonial contexts. ...
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Cuba and Africa, 1959–1994

Cuba and Africa, 1959-1994 goes beyond the military interventions that decisively shaped African political history. Each chapter presents a case study– from Algeria to Angola, to Equatorial Guinea to South Africa, and shows the multiplicity of African–Cuban relations – humanitarian and medical, scientific and educational, cultural and artistic. ...
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Inequality Studies from the Global South

This book offers an innovative, interdisciplinary approach to thinking about inequality, and to understanding how inequality is produced and reproduced in the global South. ...
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And Wrote My Story Anyway

In this book Barbara Boswell traces the ways in which black women’s fiction critically interrogates narrow ideas of nationalism. Reading their fiction as theory, for the first time these writers’ works are placed in sustained conversation with each other, producing an arc of feminist criticism that speaks forcefully back to the abuse of a racist, white-dominated, patriarchal power. ...
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Power and Loss in South African Journalism

This timely book analyses the crisis and chaos of journalism in contemporary South Africa at a period when the media and their role are frequently at the centre of public debate. The book argues for the power of public interest journalism, including investigative journalism, and a diversity of voices and positions to be reflected in the news. ...
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News

Radio Soundings: South Africa and the Black Modern by Liz Gunner wins UJ’s Book of the Year Award for 2020

Tuesday, November 17th, 2020

Wits University Press is excited to announce that author Liz Gunner has won the University of Johannesburg’s Vice-Chancellor’s Distinguished Awards 2020: Book of the Year for Radio Soundings: South Africa and the Black Modern. These awards acknowledge excellence in teaching, research, innovation and service. Professor Elizabeth “Liz” Gunner is a Visiting Research Professor with the […]

Bill Freund – a tribute

Tuesday, August 18th, 2020

6 July 1944 – 17 August 2020 MEDIA RELEASE It is with great sadness that Wits University Press heard the news of the death of social historian, academic and intellectual, Bill Freund on Monday 17 August 2020. Described as one of the grandmasters of South African economic historiography, he was a remarkable and prolific scholar and […]