Challenging Hegemony: Social Movements, and the Quest for a New Humanism in Post-Apartheid South Africa is a collection of essays by leading social movement activists and scholars that analyzes the emergence of new political struggles in post apartheid South Africa. The volume reflects on the mushrooming of new movements that represent what Frantz Fanon called “the untidy affirmation of an original idea propounded as an absolute:” a quest for a new humanism which is manifested in the movements’ most simple and basic of demands for land, housing, and medicine. A central problem addressed in the volume is how the challenge to hegemony can possibly be connected to the quest for a new humanism (or a “true humanity” in Steve Biko’s words). The essays investigate how new movements (including organized “social forums” as well as local movements) are not only challenging neo-liberal capitalist globalization, but also attempting to articulate alternatives and raise the question of what it means to be human. Whether reconnecting electricity, or struggling for housing or for HIV/AIDS anti-virals, the movements are a challenge, in the most human of ways, to the mantra that “there is no alternative” to capitalist globalization. This collection of essays edited by Nigel Gibson brings together some of the most outstanding intellectuals writing on the rise of social movements in South Africa. The writers whose work is collected in this volume include the cutting edge of intellectuals who have shown tremendous courage in their quest to be not only commentators but activists in this emerging anti neo-liberal movement. There is something valuable in every page of this collection and those interested in thoughtful and provocative analyses of the South Africa transition will be well served. Out of the dystopia of apartheid followed by neo-liberal South Africa emerges the story told in these pages of an incredible resurgence of resistance. —Ashwin Desai, author, author of We are the Poors: Community Struggles in Post-Apartheid South Africa

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