Grassroots Literacy and the Written Record

Trimbur demonstrates the transformative power of grassroots literacy in mobilizing the poor and resisting big industries. He merges activism with analytical rigor – adopting a creative style layered with the personal, narrative, and theoretically nuanced – to leave us with a text that will inspire us for similar forms of political engagement and academic relevance.

* Suresh Canagarajah, Pennsylvania State University, USA *

This is a richly detailed and illuminating study of asbestos activism in South Africa. The author’s commanding approach helps us see that justice is served, and denied, not only by control over knowledge but also by control over the modalities of participation in knowledge production and the uneven status, distribution, exchange, and circulation of these between and among periphery and metropolis.

* Bruce Horner, University of Louisville, USA *

This innovative book provides a fascinating textual history of asbestos activism and the struggles of invisible people to be counted as legitimate citizens in the aftermath of apartheid. Trimbur provides a powerful analysis of the struggles to connect grassroots literacy to the written record, arguing for the centrality of participation in this process.

* Carolyn McKinney, University of Cape Town, South Africa *

At a moment when the advances of the post-apartheid era have been called into question as never before, John Trimbur’s textual history of the asbestos activists of the Northern Cape serves as a timely reminder not only of even darker times but also of collective struggles that did have positive social and economic effects. Paying meticulous attention to the widest range of textual and extra-textual sources, Grassroots Literacy and the Written Record examines how South Africa’s highly profitable asbestos-mining industry devastated the lives of miners and their communities in the Northern Cape and how those miners and communities fought successfully for compensation.

-- David Johnson, The Open University, UK * Journal of Southern African Studies, 20