A Soviet Journey
eBook - PDF

A Soviet Journey

A Critical Annotated Edition

  1. 285 pages
  2. English
  3. PDF
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

A Soviet Journey

A Critical Annotated Edition

About this book

In 1978, the South African activist and novelist Alex La Guma (1925–1985) published A Soviet Journey, a memoir of his travels in the Soviet Union. Today it stands as one of the longest and most substantive first-hand accounts of the USSR by an African writer. La Guma's book is consequently a rare and important document of the anti-apartheid struggle and the Cold War period, depicting the Soviet model from an African perspective and the specific meaning it held for those envisioning a future South Africa. For many members of the African National Congress and the South African Communist Party, the Soviet Union represented a political system that had achieved political and economic justice through socialism—a point of view that has since been lost with the collapse of the USSR and the end of the Cold War. This new edition of A Soviet Journey—the first since 1978—restores this vision to the historical record, highlighting how activist-intellectuals like La Guma looked to the Soviet Union as a paradigm of self-determination, decolonization, and postcolonial development. The introduction by Christopher J. Lee discusses these elements of La Guma's text, in addition to situating La Guma more broadly within the intercontinental spaces of the Black Atlantic and an emergent Third World. Presenting a more expansive view of African literature and its global intellectual engagements, A Soviet Journey will be of interest to readers of African fiction and non-fiction, South African history, postcolonial Cold War studies, and radical political thought.

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Yes, you can access A Soviet Journey by Alex La Guma, Christopher J. Lee in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Social Sciences & African History. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Table of contents

  1. Table of Contents
  2. Foreword
  3. Preface
  4. Acknowledgments
  5. A Note on Edits and Annotations
  6. Introduction
  7. Epigraph
  8. Prologue
  9. Chapter One: Flashbacks
  10. Chapter Two: The Footsteps of Alexander
  11. Chapter Three: The Big Sky
  12. Chapter Four: The Golden Road
  13. Chapter Five: A Giant of Great Promise
  14. Chapter Six: Harvest Home
  15. Epilogue
  16. Bibliography
  17. Index
  18. Biographical Notes