Revolutionary Lives | Verso Reading
Biographies and memoirs of people who've lived extraordinary, complex lives including Andrée Blouin, Rigoberta Menchu, and Toussaint Louverture.
Andrée Blouin’s life story is itself a map of African national liberation.
Born in French Equatorial Africa and abandoned at the age of three, she endured years of neglect and abuse in a colonial orphanage, which she escaped after being forced by nuns into an arranged marriage at fifteen. She later became radicalized by the death of her two-year-old son, who was denied malaria medication by French officials because he was one-quarter African.
The depth of her political commitment to African nationalism—and her novelistic ability to tell the story of how she came to it and how she sustained it—make My Country, Africa a book unlike any other in the annals of decolonization.
To read her memoir is to be reminded of the heady sense of promise and possibility that still makes the years of decolonization combust like exhilarating flares.
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History is not made up of ‘great men’, but rather the collective struggles of working people. These biographies and memoirs highlight how we can find our place in movements across many fields around the world.
New and Upcoming Releases
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Graphic Biographies
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Further Reading
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