BiblioVault - Books about Voices

Generation Palestine

Voices from the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement

Edited by Rich Wiles

Pluto Press, 2013

The unique model of apartheid, colonisation and military occupation that Israel imposes on the Palestinians, along with myriad violations of international law, have made Palestine the moral cause of a generation. Yet many people continue to ask, ‘what can we do?’

Generation Palestine helps to answer this question by bringing together Palestinian and international activists in the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. The movement aims to pressure Israel until it complies with International Law, mirroring the model that was successfully utilised against South African apartheid.

With essays written by a wide selection of contributors, Generation Palestine follows the BDS movement’s model of inclusivity and collaboration. Contributors include Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Ken Loach, Iain Banks, Ronnie Kasrils, Professor Richard Falk, Ilan Pappe, Omar Barghouti, Ramzy Baroud and Archbishop Attallah Hannah, alongside other internationally acclaimed artists, writers, academics and grassroots activists.

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Ghosts Over the Boiler

Voices from Alabama's Death Row

Project Hope to Abolish the Death Penalty; Edited by Katie Owens-Murphy

Vanderbilt University Press, 2023

From a donated typewriter that frequently breaks down, people on Alabama's death row have literally cut and pasted together a newsletter, On Wings of Hope, for the last three decades to educate the public about the death penalty. This newsletter, a labor of love, documents decades of work, wisdom, activism, and lived experience of those who have been executed, or are scheduled to be executed, by the state of Alabama. The writings also chart the changing policy and practice of capital punishment in the state that sentences more people to death per capita than any other in the US.

Ghosts Over the Boiler is a curated collection of poetry, visual art, photographs, essays, creative writings, and other archival materials that have emerged from Alabama's death row from the organization Project Hope to Abolish the Death Penalty (PHADP). This group was founded at Holman Correctional Facility and has been operating autonomously since 1989 toward its mission to abolish the death penalty in Alabama and in the nation.

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Gogo Breeze

Zambia’s Radio Elder and the Voices of Free Speech

Harri Englund

University of Chicago Press, 2018

When Breeze FM, a radio station in the provincial Zambian town of Chipata, hired an elderly retired schoolteacher in 2003, no one anticipated the skyrocketing success that would follow. A self-styled grandfather on air, Gogo Breeze seeks intimacy over the airwaves and dispenses advice on a wide variety of grievances and transgressions. Multiple voices are broadcast and juxtaposed through call-ins and dialogue, but free speech finds its ally in the radio elder who, by allowing people to be heard and supporting their claims, reminds authorities of their obligations toward the disaffected.

Harri Englund provides a masterfully detailed study of this popular radio personality that addresses broad questions of free speech in Zambia and beyond. By drawing on ethnographic insights into political communication, Englund presents multivocal morality as an alternative to dominant Euro-American perspectives, displacing the simplistic notion of voice as individual personal property—an idea common in both policy and activist rhetoric. Instead, Englund focuses on the creativity and polyphony of Zambian radio while raising important questions about hierarchy, elderhood, and ethics in the public sphere.

A lively, engaging portrait of an extraordinary personality, Gogo Breeze will interest Africanists, scholars of radio and mass media, and anyone interested in the history and future of free speech.

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