Elsewhere Texts – serie

This book offers the first comprehensive examination of the work of Bolivian political thinker Rene Zavaleta (1939 84), whose ideas were a key influence on many of the indigenous activists and ideologues who have transformed Bolivian politics and economics in recent years. Luis Tapia, a political analyst who has worked closely with many of the central figures in today's Bolivian government, presents a detailed panorama of Bolivian history that sets Zavaleta's analyses in context and helps readers and activists alike understand the history and ideological currents that underpinned the rise of the neo-indigenous movement in the twenty-first century. "Tapia is the greatest scholar of the work of his countryman." Jaime Ortega Reyna, SciELO Mexico

Bolivia's foremost social and political theorist, Rene Zavaleta Mercado held diplomatic and ministerial posts with the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement in the 1950s and '60s, before eventually aligning with the Marxist left, where he developed the creative, heterodox philosophy for which he is known. Towards a History of the National-Popular in Bolivia is his final and most significant work, available in English for the first time. Published posthumously, the book explores a series of critical moments in Bolivian history to illuminate the reconstitution of seigneurial rule and the challenges posed by plebeian, indigenous, and working-class projects, agitating for a more inclusive nation. It is a work of reflexive social theory that explores the limits of its own conceptual frameworks including classical political philosophy and Marxism through an engagement with the history that made possible its own conceptual horizons. In its content, method, and style, the book offers an original reflection on social formations and political knowledge that have far-reaching implications for the Global South.Rooted in history and yet exceedingly relevant, Zavaleta's revolutionary work makes contemporary a long genealogy of theories of the national-popular from Gramsci and Mariategui, to Fanon and Ho Chi Minh.

One of few books translated into English from Sesotho, In My Heart introduces a long-neglected voice to global readership.Elsewhere Texts, edited by Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak and Hosam Aboul-Ela, presents radical new engagements with non-European literary cultures. This volume, the latest in this ambitious series, is a brilliant collection of essays originally written in Sesotho by Sophonia Machabe Mofokeng. Often confined to the role of “native informants” in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, writers working in African languages laid the foundation for the politics and poetics of decolonization and are legendary among their own communities of readers, though their work remains little known elsewhere. In My Heart belongs to this tradition of colonial renegades. Writing in the 1950s during the cataclysmic events of apartheid that were transforming life in South Africa, Mofokeng offers a series of meditations that provide his readers with a Sesotho worldview outside the categories authorized by colonial knowledge. In My Heart, expertly translated by Nhlanhla Maake, introduces a significant African thinker’s influential work to a global readership.

An exploration of the philosophical dimensions of translation, celebrating it as a practice that preserves and proliferates cultural differences.Abdessalam Benabdelali is a revered Moroccan philosopher and translator whose work maps an invaluable history of the status of translation in contemporary Arabic thought and language. Bringing together essays from two linked Arabic works by Benabdelali—On Translation and Hosting the Stranger—this volume represents one of the first extended philosophical explorations of translation by a contemporary Arab philosopher. These works reframe Arabic and European cultural histories around translation to counter hegemonic discourses and celebrate translation as a form of philosophical thought and practice, one that both preserves and proliferates difference.Whether discussing eighteenth-century European perceptions of Arabic culture, classical Arabic literature and its express intent to resist all translation, or contemporary Arabic authors who write in anticipation of translation, Writings on Translation nimbly outlines the key philosophical questions at stake in translation. It concludes with an impassioned argument for translations that “host the stranger” and allow texts to “lift off and migrate.”

A rigorous exploration of literature as a tool for social change, revealing how gender and national identity intertwine in China’s modern development.How has literature shaped gender politics in modern China? How has the concept of “woman” evolved within the shifting sociopolitical landscape? Old Chains and New delves into these questions by examining the dynamic interplay between literature, gender, and historical change. Drawing from literary studies, history, and sociology, this book reveals how women’s writing has not only reflected but also actively shaped cultural and national transformations.From the late Qing era, when the “woman question” emerged as part of China’s response to imperialist pressures, to the ongoing evolution of feminist literary scholarship, this study argues that gender and literature are deeply interwoven. Women’s liberation in modern China was never solely about gender equality—it became a driving force for broader social change and national identity formation. Engaging with the complexities of women’s literature through a cultural-political lens, this book challenges static definitions and calls for a reevaluation of women’s literature not just as a literary category but as a key component in shaping China’s modern intellectual and cultural history.By adopting the framework of “China as method,” Old Chains and New reimagines the role of literature in ideological and cultural shifts. It highlights women’s writing as a unique form of aesthetic politics—one with the power to intervene in and transform reality.