New Sudans

Using stories, songs and handmade textbooks, this book uncovers working-class South Sudanese political thought through a postcolonial war.

Based on ten years of research in South Sudan, and hundreds of stories, poems, songs, jokes and photographs, this book tells the history of political ideas and projects organised by South Sudanese people displaced by war and famine in the capital Khartoum over Sudan's second civil war from 1983–2005.Over a million southern Sudanese people fled to Sudan's capital Khartoum during the wars and famines of the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. This book is an intellectual history of these war-displaced working people's political organising and critical theory during a long conflict. It explores how these men and women thought through their circumstances, tried to build potential political communities, and imagined possible futures. Based on ten years of research in South Sudan, using personal stories, private archives, songs, poetry, photograph albums, self-written histories, jokes and new handmade textbooks, New Sudans follows its idealists' and pragmatists' variously radical, conservative, and creative projects across two decades on the peripheries of a hostile city. Through everyday theories of Blackness, freedom and education in a long civil war, Nicki Kindersley opens up new possibilities in postcolonial intellectual histories of the working class in Africa.