Ghirmai Negash Livres

Welcome to Our Hillbrow is an exhilarating and disturbing ride through the chaotic and hyper-real zone of Hillbrow—microcosm of all that is contradictory, alluring, and painful in the postapartheid South African psyche. Everything is there: the shattered dreams of youth, sexuality and its unpredictable costs, AIDS, xenophobia, suicide, the omnipotent violence that often cuts short the promise of young people’s lives, and the Africanist understanding of the life continuum that does not end with death but flows on into an ancestral realm. Infused with the rhythms of the inner-city pulsebeat, this courageous novel is compelling in its honesty and its broad vision, which links Hillbrow, rural Tiragalong, and Oxford. It spills out the guts of Hillbrow—living with the same energy and intimate knowledge with which the Drum writers wrote Sophiatown into being.

Recent criticism on African literature and visual art, affected by contemporary global socio-economic and political influences, has been moving away from a singular focus on postcolonial theory towards notions of transnationalism. There have been visible critical attempts that question the relevance of postcolonial critique, while various globally orientated critical approaches have emerged, complicating the notion of postcoloniality as we have known it. This book consists of essays and articles that demonstrate this critical shift.

The phenomenon and relevance of Latin America-born Liberation Theology in the African post-colony of Eritrea.