DREAMING OF FREEDOM IN SOUTH AFRICA, literature between critique and utopia

 224pp., illus., paperback, First SA Edition, Cape Town, 2020

First published in the UK in 2020.

Johnson examines different texts imagining the future in South Africa after the end of apartheid: literary texts from the 1880s to the 1970s and political manifestos and programmes of the African National Congress, the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union, the Communist Party of South Africa, the Non-European Unity Movement and the Pan-Africanist Congress.

"By analysing a wide variety of political and literary texts, this study exposes the dead ends of liberal ideology and recovers alternative traditions of Marxism and working-class struggle written out of nationalist and Stalinist historiography." Benita Parry, University of Warwick

"Johnson's innovative, meticulously researched book, full of surprises, explores South Africa's marginalised literary and political traditions, thus enriching our understanding of the freedom struggle in all its complexity and diversity." Allison Drew, University of York and University of Cape Town

David Johnson is Professor of Literature at The Open University. He is the author of Shakespeare and South Africa (1996) and Imagining the Cape Colony (2012) and co-editor of A Historical Companion to Postcolonial Literatures in English (2005) and The Book in Africa (2015). He was co-editor of the series Postcolonial Literary Studies and is editor of the ongoing series Key Texts in Anti-colonial Thought.