Description: South Africa historian Clifton Crais combines a cultural history of state formation with an analysis of African conceptions of power and the moral problem of evil. He explores the role of ideas held by Africans and Europeans in shaping political society throughout South Africa's history. He demonstrates how Africans contested one of the great evils of the twentieth century: apartheid. Crais discusses colonialism, resistance, nationalism, violence, and the challenges to creating democracy.
Brief description: Clifton Crais is Professor of History and Director of the Institute of African Studies at Emory University. He is author of over one hundred works, including Poverty, War, and Violence in South Africa(Cambridge, 2011); Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography (2008) - on the woman more famously known as the 'Hottentot Venus' and the subject of a feature film, 'Venus Noire' - and White Supremacy and Black Resistance in Pre-Industrial South Africa: The Making of the Colonial Order in the Eastern Cape, 1770-1865 (Cambridge, 1992). He is also editor of The Culture of Power in Southern Africa: Essays on State Formation and the Political Imagination (2003), co-editor of Breaking the Chains: Slavery and its Legacy in Nineteenth-Century South Africa (1995) and Area Editor of the Encyclopedia of World History (8 volumes, 2008). Crais is also the author of History Lessons (2014), a work that combines memoir, historiography and the neuroscience of memory, and a documentary history of South Africa. Long-range works include a history of violence and explorations of fiction and creative non-fiction concerning memory and narrative.
Review Quotes: "The Politics of Evil is a pathbreaking book, sure to generate discussion among historians of South Africa." History: Reviews of New Books