Reading Revolution. Shakespeare On Robben Island

Cover Type: Hardcover
Book Condition: Fine
Jacket Condition: Fine
Publisher: Unisa Press
Publisher Place: Pretoria
Publisher Year: 2012
Edition: First Edition

Description: 129 pages. Book and Jacket appear to have hardly been read and are both in Fine condition throughout.

Publishers Description: The prison authorities on South Africas Robben Island displayed a remarkable obsession with censoring the news that prisoners could receive from the outside world. Yet, as the pages of this book reveal, political prisoners managed to escape these constraints through literature, travelling to the sites of contemporary revolutionary struggles and to the frontlines of the French and Bolshevik revolutions. Tolstoy jostled with Trotsky, while Shakespeare winged his way over the walls of the single and communal cells. As the prisoners brought their experiences to bear on the text, the works of Shakespeare were mined for their anti-colonial and anti-apartheid inspirations, as much as for the power and beauty of their words. The texts also left their mark on the consciousness and memories of liberation fighters, with many prisoners still reciting lines from Shakespeares plays and sonnets some three decades after their release. Through the memories and biographical accounts written by former political inmates, the book evocatively brings to life the voices of prisoners who furtively copied books at night before they were snatched back by the prison guards. Reading Revolution is about how words can inspire the human spirit, light up the intellect, and free the reader to travel the world. But, this is not a book simply about the past. By opening the all-too-quickly-forgotten pages of history, the book seeks to ignite once more, a reading revolution, to stir up the imagination in a South Africa whose democratic transition seeks to consolidate power from above, while being increasingly contested by insurgent protest from below.

ISBN: 9781868886838