BOOK LAUNCH EVENT
You are invited to join Daniel Magaziner for the launch of his book, Available Light: Omar Badsha and the Struggle for Change in South Africa.
Tuesday, October 22
11:00am-1:00pm
Smith Warehouse, Bay 4, Ahmadieh Family Lecture Hall
Free lunch provided
Hybrid: also via Zoom – register for the Zoom link at https://duke.is/magaziner
Daniel Magaziner (Professor of History, Yale University) will be in conversation with Lauren Jarvis (Associate Professor of History, UNC – Chapel Hill).
Book Description
Available Light tells the story of an activist, his community and family across the second half of the twentieth century. Born in Durban in 1945, Omar Badsha’s was the third generation of his Gujarati family to call South Africa home. Before he turned five, the country’s white electorate had voted to institute apartheid to strip the rights and privileges of citizenship from most of the population, including Badsha’s Indian community and especially the country’s Black majority. By the time he turned fifteen, nonviolent protest against apartheid had been quashed; by the time he turned twenty, so too had the armed struggle to dislodge white supremacy within the country. The ongoing, resilient, and oft-rebuffed struggle against apartheid was a definitive factor in Badsha’s life. It is also the story of the form his activism took: wherein aesthetic searching and subjective experience drove him to create an impassioned, engaged art, first as a graphic artist, eventually as a photographer, and then an archivist. Creating helped him to refine his voice and to capture the political ethic by which he strove to live his life and which he shared with similarly committed artist-activists. Available Light chronicles how art and politics became intertwined in South Africa and explains what it takes to maintain a critical aesthetic approach to political crises in the past and present.
Author Biography
Dan Magaziner a Professor in the History Department at Yale University. He is a historian of 20th century Africa. He is the author of The Law and the Prophets: Black Consciousness in South Africa, 1968 – 1977 (2010) and The Art of Life in South Africa (2016). Available Light: Omar Badsha and the Struggle for Change in South Africa is his third book.
Discussant Biography
Lauren V. Jarvis is an Associate Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is interested in the history of economic transformation — as well as its many social and cultural consequences – in nineteenth- and twentieth-century South Africa. Her first book, A Prophet of the People: Isaiah Shembe and the Making of a South African Church, was published by Michigan University Press in 2024.
Co-sponsors:
Duke AAAS, Duke English, Africa Initiative, and Concilium for Southern Africa
