“Fire by Night, Cloud by Day”: Exile and Refuge in Postwar London

Susan Pennybacker's presidential plenary to the 2017 North American Conference on British Studies in Denver, Colorado, explores the lives of four of the subjects of her book (in progress) of the same title. It identifies the kinds of archival and ethnographic sources that allow new treatments of the exile, émigré, and expatriate communities of London after the close of World War II and of those who contributed in various ways to the ethos of metropolitan political culture in the “late empire” and Cold War era. The essay focuses on the South African Ruth First, the Indian diplomat Mrs. Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, the Indian academician Achin Vanaik, and the South Asian Londoner Suresh Grover, a member of the Monitoring Group, a legal assistance and anti-discrimination organization in the capital. It suggests the importance of scholarship that reckons with known and notable activist persons who led and represented many others in their challenges to global politics from a base in the “mammoth crossroads, the secure and unsafe haven that is London.”

Introduction to Looked Class, Talked Red by Barbara Harlow

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.

Looked Class, Talked Red: towards a bio-bibliography of Ruth First

This article includes material from a work-in-progress, Barbara Harlow’s major book on South African writer and political activist, Ruth First, assassinated in 1982. Ruth First’s own life followed many paths, intersecting along the way with several historical trajectories, national narratives that remain incomplete today, and political events and eventualities that are still being negotiated, contested and resisted. The author follows these paths in an attempt to locate a framework and a direction for writing what she calls a bio-bibliography, an intellectual biography that is at once a political history.

Introduction

The guest editors of a special issue of Race & Class 60 no. 3 (2019), ‘Solidarity here and everywhere: the lifework of Barbara Harlow’, provide a short biography of Harlow and discuss her key works: Resistance Literature; Barred: women, writing and political detention; and After Lives: legacies of revolutionary writing. They explain the importance of her work as ‘a critic of both the world and the text’ across disciplines, in establishing new fields of study, and as a reviewer. A symposium in October 2017 of former students had commemorated her path-breaking work in terms of decolonisation, imperialism and literature. Two of Harlow’s unfinished book projects – on anti-apartheid activist Ruth First and on the challenges of drone warfare – as well as tributes from those who had been influenced by her teaching are flagged up. The authors explain why they choose the phrase ‘solidarity here and everywhere’ from Edward Said to title the issue.