On April 7, 1988, Albie Sachs, an activist South African lawyer and a leading member of the ANC, was car-bombed in Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, by agents of South Africa’s security forces. His right arm was blown off, and he lost sight in one eye. This intimate and moving account of his recovery traces the gradual recuperation of his broken body and his triumphant reentry into the world, where his dream of soft vengeance was realized with the achievement of democracy in South Africa. This book captures the spirit of a remarkable man: his enormous optimism, his commitment to social justice, and his joyous wonder at the life that surrounds him. A new preface and epilogue reflect on the making of Abby Ginzberg’s documentary film titled Soft Vengeance: Albie Sachs and the New South Africa. (For information about the film, see www.softvengeancefilm.org.)
As a kid, Noam Chomsky handed out the Daily Mirror at his uncle's newsstand on 72nd Street, inadvertently finding himself in a buzzing intellectual and political hub for European immigrants in New York. Iranian human rights Nobelist Shirin Ebadi and her husband signed their own legal contract, attempting to restore equality to their marriage after the Iranian Revolution effectively erased the legal rights of women. Elizabeth Warren set out to expose those frauds declaring bankruptcy and taking advantage of the system-only to discover, in her research, a very different story of hard-working middle-class families facing economic collapse in the absence of a social safety net. While studying at Oxford, a young Tariq Ali made a bet with a friend that he could work the Vietnam War into every single answer on his final exams. In this rousing, thoughtful, often funny, and always inspiring volume, a diverse and impressive group of thinkers reflect on those formative experiences that shaped their own political commitments. A fascinating new window into the revealing links between the personal and the political, Political Awakenings will engage readers across generations.
A stirring collection of public talks and essays by an activist and former judge offers an intimate insider’s view of South Africa’s Constitution. This stirring collection of essays and talks by activist and former judge Albie Sachs is the culmination of more than 25 years of thought about constitution-making and non-racialism. Following the Constitutional Court's landmark Nkandla ruling in March 2016, it serves as a powerful reminder of the tenets of the Constitution, the rule of law and the continuous struggle to uphold democratic rights and freedoms. We, the People offers an intimate insider's view of South Africa's Constitution by a writer who has been deeply entrenched in its historical journey from the depths of apartheid right up to the politically contested present. As a second-year law student at the University of Cape Town, Sachs took part in the Defiance Campaign and went on to attend the Congress of the People in Kliptown, where the Freedom Charter was adopted in 1955. Three decades later, shortly after the bomb attack in Maputo that cost him his arm and the sight in one eye, he was called on by the Constitutional Committee of the African National Congress to co-draft (with Kader Asmal) the first outline of a Bill of Rights for a new democratic South Africa. In 1994, he was appointed by Nelson Mandela to the Constitutional Court, where he served as a judge until 2009. We, the People contains some of Sachs' most memorable public talks and writings, in which he takes us back to the broad-based popular foundations of the Constitution in the Freedom Charter. He picks up on Oliver Tambo's original vision of a non-racial future for South Africa, rather than one based on institutionalised power-sharing between the races. He explores the tension between perfectability and corruptibility, hope and mistrust, which lies at the centre of all constitutions. Sachs discusses the enforcement of social and economic rights, and contemplates the building of the Constitutional Court in the heart of the Old Fort Prison as a mechanism for reconciling the past and the future. Subjective experience and objective analysis interact powerfully in a personalised narrative that reasserts the value of constitutionality not just for South Africans, but for people striving to advance human dignity, equality and freedom across the world today.
In Donald Trump’s America, protesting has roared back into fashion. The Women’s March, held the day after Trump’s inauguration, may have been the largest in American history, and resonated around the world. Between Trump’s tweets and the march’s popularity, it is clear that displays of anger dominate American politics once again. There is an extensive body of research on protest, but the focus has mostly been on the calculating brain—a byproduct of structuralism and cognitive studies—and less on the feeling brain. James M. Jasper’s work changes that, as he pushes the boundaries of our present understanding of the social world. In The Emotions of Protest, Jasper lays out his argument, showing that it is impossible to separate cognition and emotion. At a minimum, he says, we cannot understand the Tea Party or Occupy Wall Street or pro- and anti-Trump rallies without first studying the fears and anger, moral outrage, and patterns of hate and love that their members feel. This is a book centered on protest, but Jasper also points toward broader paths of inquiry that have the power to transform the way social scientists picture social life and action. Through emotions, he says, we are embedded in a variety of environmental, bodily, social, moral, and temporal contexts, as we feel our way both consciously and unconsciously toward some things and away from others. Politics and collective action have always been a kind of laboratory for working out models of human action more generally, and emotions are no exception. Both hearts and minds rely on the same feelings racing through our central nervous systems. Protestors have emotions, like everyone else, but theirs are thinking hearts, not bleeding hearts. Brains can feel, and hearts can think.
This book draws on a range of key archives and oral testimonies to provide the first systematic and historical study of the origins, context, development, frustrations, inner contradictions, and legacies of the Columbus Centre. The Columbus Centre, a remarkable though largely forgotten research institute, was established at the University of Sussex in 1966, triggered by claims of a dearth of academic research about Nazism and the Holocaust. Its basic stated aim was to bring together psychoanalysis and history for a scholarly investigation of discrimination, mass violence, and the preconditions of genocide in the past and the present. The Nazi crimes were studied along with other instances of prejudice and mass violence, such as sixteenth- and seventeenth-century witch-hunts, South African apartheid, the persecution of the Roma people, and race relations in the United States and modern-day Britain. The book seeks to place the Columbus Centre in the historiography of mass violence by analysing the Centre’s works through four historiographical prisms or power relations in which they were produced: psychoanalysis, class, race, and gender. This interdisciplinary volume is a valuable text for scholars and students of historiography, psychoanalysis, genocide and violence, and postwar Europe, and for professionals within the field of psychology.
Since the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of Yugoslavia, the Mediterranean and Black Sea regions have been faced with multiple upheavals of interethnic violence, bloody secessions and ethnic cleansing. Up to the present, both regions are confronted with unresolved border, minority and security issues, matters of recognition, protracted traumata and claims for justice. After the fall of the iron curtain, simmering ethnic tensions turned into hot wars that created new states, new power-political hierarchies and a heritage of violence. Reaching back to the early 1990s, several international and national transitional justice measures have been applied to face these heritages and lay the foundations for a common future. For the former Yugoslavia, they range from broad criminal trials to a series of restorative justice mechanisms; in the North and South Caucasus they encompass numerous mediation measures and primarily restorative justice efforts. The present volume is concerned with strategies of conflict resolution and prevention subsumed under the concept of reconciliation. It aims at understanding the socio-emotional root causes of political cleavages and daily realities of (post-) conflict societies, especially regarding the impact of competing narratives and unprocessed pasts on exclusive identities and strategic political choices. Applying reconciliation theory, insights from collective memory and transitional justice to a series of selected field studies, it sheds light on the origins of interethnic violence, aims at finding explanations for the fact that many of the above-mentioned conflicts have become intractable and discusses the chances and challenges for transforming interests, emotions, perspectives, roles and identities between and within the respective societies.
Graeae has been a force for change in world-class theatre since it was founded in 1980, placing D/deaf and disabled actors centre stage and challenging preconceptions. A work in progress contains the full script of Reasons to be cheerful, a brief history of the company, analysis and extracts from their previous shows, memories of Graeae from previous collaborators, including Jack Thorne, Jo Clifford, Kaite O'Reilly and Jonathan Meth, and a host of images.
The Bloomsbury Guide to Pastoral Care provides a framework for reflection on pastoral care practice and identifies frontier learning from the new and challenging practical contexts which are important in pastoral care research today. In this collection of essays from leading practitioner-scholars, Bernadette Flanagan and Sharon Thornton set out core principles underpinning professional identity and the practice of pastoral care in rapidly changing social settings. Such pastoral challenges as, developing compassionate and effective companioning to those who have suffered trauma, torture, catastrophic events, social disintegration, the moral wounds of war and cultural dislocation are treated with insight and deep care. The new frontiers of pastoral care in more familiar circumstances such as family, health settings where patients facing life-challenging medical events and multi-cultural communities are also explored. With contributions from Kevin Egan, Michael O'Sullivan SJ, Rita Nakashima Brock and Julia Prinz VDMF, The Bloomsbury Guide to Pastoral Care is an essential reference for the theory and practice of pastoral care.