The author remembers his friend and colleague Barbara Harlow and provides an introductory context for the selection from her book-in-progress on Ruth First published in this special issue of Race & Class 60, no. 3 (2019). He describes just how Ruth First became of interest to Harlow, explaining the intersections of Ruth First’s personal history as a public intellectual with the history of decolonisation and the anti-apartheid movement, and the intersection of a ‘public’ and ‘private’ or domestic life. He speculates as to why the project of over thirty years remained unfinished in terms of a final publication.
SegalRonald, ‘Ruth First: a memorial address’, Review of African Political Economy 9, no. 25 (1982), pp. 52–54.
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‘From the women’s prison: Third World women’s narratives of prison’, Feminist Studies 12, no. 3 (1986), pp. 501–24; ‘Political detention: countering the university’, October 53 (1990), pp. 41–61; ‘Drawing the line: cultural politics and the legacy of partition’, Polygraph 5 (1992), pp. 84–111; ‘Speaking from the dock’, Callaloo 16, no. 4 (1993), pp. 874–90; ‘Writers and assassinations’, in Sidney J. Melle and Robin D. G. Kelley, eds, Imagining Home: class, culture and nationalism in the African Diaspora (New York: Verso, 1994), pp. 167–84; ‘From the civilizing mission to humanitarian interventionism: postmodernism, writing and human rights’, in Peter C. Pfeiffer and Laura García-Moreno, eds, Text and Narration (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 1996), pp. 31–47; ‘Ruth First and the politics of dissent’, AUETSA 96: Conference Proceedings (Bellville: University of Western Cape Press, 1997), pp. 196–200; ‘Writers and assassinations’, Suitcase II, no. 1–2 (1997), pp. 116–22; ‘What was she doing there? Women as “legitimate targets”’, in Marjorie Agosín, ed., Women, Gender and Human Rights: a global perspective (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001), pp. 267–82; ‘Structurally adjusted amnesia: South Africa’s long march and longer walk to freedom’, in Dubravka Juraga and M. Keith Booker, eds, Reading Global Socialist Cultures After the Cold War: the reassessment of a tradition (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002), pp. 149–64; ‘“Good men in Africa?”: from missionaries to mercenaries’, in Toyin Falola and Christian Jennings, eds, Africanizing Knowledge: African Studies across the disciplines (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2002), pp. 251–61; ‘Redlined Africa: Ruth First’s Barrel of a Gun’, Biography 25 no. 1 (2002), pp. 151–70; ‘Looked class, talked red: sketches of Ruth First and redlined Africa’, Meridians 3, no. 1 (2002), pp. 226–51; ‘Ruth First and Olive Schreiner’, in Toyin Falola, ed., The Dark Webs: perspectives on colonialism in Africa (Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 2005), pp. 329–53; ‘Red lines and green books: Ruth First in Libya’, Current Writing 16, no. 1 (2008), pp. 15–32; ‘“Flushed with elation”: Ruth First at the University of Dar es Salaam’, Chemchem: Bulletin of the Mwalimu Professorial Chair in Pan-African Studies of the University of Dar es Salaam (inaugural issue, 2009); ‘Public spheres, personal papers, pedagogical practices: Ruth First’s academic postings to/from Dar es Salaam and Maputo’, Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics 20 (2009), pp. 171–94; ‘United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973 (2011): Libya in the dock’, Rapoport Center Human Rights Working Paper Series (December 2011), with Daniel Kahozi, Lucas Lixinski and Caroline Carter, http://blogs.utexas.edu/rapoportcenterwps/working-papers/62011-barbara-harlow-daniel-kahozi-lucas-lixinski-and-caroline-carter-united-nations-security-council-resolution-1973-2011-libya-in-the-dock/; ‘From flying carpets to no-fly zones: Libya’s elusive revolution(s), according to Ruth First, Hisham Matar, and the International Criminal Court’, Journal of Arabic Literature 2–3, no. 43 (2012), pp. 431–57; ‘Apartheid or not apartheid? The Russell Tribunal on Palestine, South Africa session, November 2011’, Law, Culture and the Humanities 9, no. 3 (2013), pp. 412–20; ‘“Today is human rights day”: Ruth First, human rights and the United Nations’, Review of African Political Economy 41, no. 139 (2014), pp. 125–33.
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‘Postcolonial’ was a term Barbara refused, because the persistence of colonialism in both its older territorial forms and newer de-territorialised ones was obvious to her.
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HarlowBarbara, ‘Public spheres, personal papers, pedagogical practices’.
