Desiree Lewis and Gabeba Baderoon: Surfacing. On being black and feminist in South Africa

HUMA Book Lunch Series

Editors: Desiree Lewis (University of the Western Cape, South Africa) and Gabeba Baderoon (Pennsylvania State University, United States) 

An anthology dedicated to contemporary Black South African feminist writing influential to today's scholars and radical thinkers

What do African feminist traditions that exist outside the canon look and feel like? Which complex cultural logics are at work outside the centres of power? How do spirituality and feminism influence each other? What are the histories and experiences of queer Africans? What imaginative forms can feminist activism take?

Surfacing: On Being Black and Feminist in South Africa is the first collection of essays dedicated to contemporary Black South African feminist perspectives. Leading feminist theorist Desiree Lewis and poet and feminist scholar Gabeba Baderoon have curated contributions by some of the finest writers and thought leaders. Radical polemic sits side by side with personal essays, and critical theory coexists with rich and stirring life histories. By including writings by Patricia McFadden, Panashe Chigumadzi, Sisonke Msimang, Zukiswa Wanner, Yewande Omotoso, Zoë Wicomb and Pumla Dineo Gqola alongside emerging thinkers, activists and creative practitioners, the collection demonstrates a dazzling range of feminist voices.

The writers in these pages use creative expression, photography and poetry in eclectic, interdisciplinary ways to unearth and interrogate representations of Blackness, sexuality, girlhood, history, divinity, and other themes. Surfacing is indispensable to anyone interested in feminism from Africa, which its contributors present in vivid and challenging conversations with the rest of the world. It will appeal to a diverse audience of students, activists, critical thinkers, academics and artists. 

Read book introduction | See book: Surfacing. On being black and feminist in South Africa (Wits University Press, 2021).
^{Extracts made available with the kind permission of the editors.}

About the editors

Professor Desiree Lewis teaches in the Women's and Gender Studies Department at the University of the Western Cape. As an interdisciplinary feminist scholar and intellectual activist, she has also taught at several other South African universities and held visiting professorships and chairs, including the Mari Jahoda Visting Chair in International Gender Studies, Visiting Professor at the African Gender Institute at UCT in South Africa, Georgia State University, NYU as well as universities and research institutes in Sweden and Finland. She has published widely on feminism in Africa, literary and cultural studies, as well as sexualities, gender and embodied identities. Her writings include Living on a Horizon: Bessie Head and the politics of imagining, Surfacing: On being black and feminist in South Africa, and, in recent years, articles and book chapters such as 'Governmentality and South Africa's edifice of gender and sexual rights' (Journal of Asian and African Studies, 2021) and 'Nativism African bodies and photographic performance' (The Oxford Handbook of Politics and Performance, 2021). As the Principal Researcher of Critical Food Studies, an intra-institutional Mellon-funded project, she is currently focusing on food as material culture and seeks to extend innovative research and intellectual community-building in the field of critical food studies from the perspective of the global South.

Gabeba Baderoon is the author of the poetry collections The dream in the next body, A hundred silences and The history of intimacy, and the monograph, Regarding Muslims: From slavery to post-apartheid. With Desiree Lewis, she is the co-editor of the collection Surfacing: On being black and feminist in South Africa. Baderoon has edited acclaimed poetry books by Epiphanie Mukasano, Phillippa Yaa de Villiers, Bandile Gumbi and Natalia Molebatsi. She is a member of the editorial board of the African Poetry Book Fund, which has published over 70 collections since 2012. Baderoon has co-edited three special journal issues: 'African feminisms: Cartographies for the twenty-first century' (Meridians, 2018), 'Writing Islam and the Everyday in South Africa' (Social Dynamics, 2012) and 'Theorising experience, subjectivity and narrative in studies of gender and Islam' (Journal for Islamic Studies, 2013). She co-directs the African Feminist Initiative at Pennsylvania State University, where she is an Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies and African Studies. She is also an Extraordinary Professor of English at Stellenbosch University.