Axes of Inequality Speaker: Jonny Steinberg

Jonny Steinberg is a South African writer, journalist, and policy analyst who is currently in New York as an Open Society Fellow. After having been selected as a Rhodes Scholar and received a doctorate in political theory from Oxford (1998), Steinberg has gone on to write several books about everyday life following South Africa’s negotiated transition to democracy. Two of Steinberg’s books have won South Africa’s premier nonfiction literary award, the Sunday Times Alan Paton Prize: Midlands (2002), and The Number (2004). His latest book, Sizwe’s Test (2008), is an ethnography that chronicles a young man’s personal journey with the difficult realities of the AIDS pandemic in South Africa’s Eastern Cape province. Embracing the social and cultural complexities of the epidemic, Sizwe’s Test is the definitive ethnographic exploration of AIDS in post-apartheid South Africa. Steinberg is currently writing a book about a Liberian diaspora community in a Staten Island housing project and the ways in which its members have carried memories of civil war with them to New York. The book explores whether truth and reconciliation proceedings can help heal the wounds that postwar diasporas bear.