Dying for Freedom
Political Martyrdom in South Africa
Format:Paperback
Publisher:John Wiley and Sons Ltd
Published:26th Jul '24
£15.99
This title is due to be published on 26th July, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
This paperback is available in another edition too:
- Hardback£50.00(9781509561070)
What happens when death becomes the ultimate marker of one’s commitment to one’s freedom? What happens when the opposite of freedom is not unfreedom but death, not slavery but mortality? How are we to think of the right to life when a political demand for dignity and honor might be more important than life itself?
Dying for Freedom explores these questions by drawing on archival evidence from South Africa to show how death and conflicting notions of sacrifice dominated the struggle for political equality in that country. This political investment in death as a marker of commitment to the anti-apartheid struggle encouraged a masculinist style of politics in which the fight for freedom was seen and understood by many activists as a struggle literally for manhood. This investment generated a notion of political sacrifice so absolute that anything less than death was rendered suspect. More importantly, it resulted in a hierarchy of death whereby some deaths were more important than others, and where some deaths could be mourned and others not.
This highly original account of the necropolitics of the liberation struggle will be of interest to students and scholars throughout the humanities and social sciences and to anyone interested in South Africa.
ISBN: 9781509561087
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
180 pages