What should a postapartheid black feminism look like? Gabeba Baderoon and Desiree Lewis, editors of the new book, Surfacing: On being black and feminist in South Africa, have been at the heart of academic debates about this and related questions for at least the last two decades, so they would have an idea. To mark the book’s appearance, I interviewed Lewis about some of the debates swirling around black feminism in South Africa.

One of the main quarrels of the book is with global black feminism; its insularity and limited focus. As Baderoon and Lewis write in the introduction, “… our students often cite African American theorists and, less often, the Caribbean and West African scholars, but very rarely southern African ones …” At some level, this may have to do with the political economy of publishing, social media and celebrity culture, but it may also have something to do with the disappointment that younger, black feminists have with the ruling ANC, its Women’s League, the transition as well as with previous generations of feminists. But the young feminists, whose politics found concrete expression in Rhodes Must Fall (RMF) and Fees Must Fall (FMF) in the mid-to-late 2010s, may also be reacting to a perceived sense that their elders haven’t produced enough theory or activism to help them make sense of and challenge the new. To the credit of Baderoon, Lewis and contributors, some of the difficult generational debates and divides are taken on, and new ones introduced. For example, they insist on a dynamic definition of black that connects them with the Black Consciousness Movement of the early 1970s as well as the RMF and FMF activists. The same energy is present in how they include contributors from elsewhere on the continent who live and work in South Africa. Some highlights include an interview by Lewis with Zoe Wicomb, arguably one of South Africa’s finest novelists and literary theorists. Other contributors write about how their most significant influences are white feminists—Gertrude Fester writes about being influenced by Sally Gross, and Sa’diyaa Shaikh by Denise Ackermann—suggesting possibilities for meaningful collaborations between black and white feminists in South and Southern Africa.

This book covers a lot,  and should be celebrated for being the first collection dedicated to contemporary Black South African feminist perspectives. However, I was looking for contributions that relate to questions animating blogs and social media. What do the editors and contributors make of popular figures such as Chimamanda Adichie (mentioned in passing in the introduction), who now occupies a lot of space (often controversially) in mainstream feminist discourses for her commentary on African and Black feminism, including trans identities? Even more striking, the book is silent on class politics or how black feminism relates to postcolonial, mainly state-led nationalist projects in the region. For example, where would Myrtle Witbooi of the South African Domestic Service and Allied Workers Union, Women on Farms, the working class women in places like Manenberg profiled by the late Elaine Salo, or those women who left the ANC Women’s League for the EFF, feature in all this? Where do they fit into new conceptions and applications of black feminism? How do aspirations of black South African feminism relate to existing social movements? The interview was conducted over email.