Content:

Join author Simukai Chigudu in conversation with Barbara Sostaita and Adam Goodman about his new book, Chasing Freedom: Coming of Age at the End of Empire.

Chasing Freedom is an exquisitely crafted memoir, sweeping from Zimbabwe to Oxford, that lays bare the violent, enduring legacy of colonialism on both a country and a family. Simukai Chigudu grew up in the shadow of Africa’s struggles for liberation. As he navigates the tangled threads of personal and political history, he is guided by one central question: What does it mean to be truly free?

In this gorgeous and atmospheric family memoir, Chigudu embarks on a quest to understand how the trauma of decolonization has shaped not only his country, but his very identity—as an African, a migrant, a Black man, a doctor, a scholar, and a son. What he discovers is that colonization is a potent force that continues to upend lives and institutions. Chasing Freedom is an intimate reckoning with the ghosts of the past that haunt our politics and our psyches in ways we can’t always see.

**We ask all attendees wear masks in the event space during the program for the health and well-being of the speakers and other guests. We will have books for sale after the program. **

Speakers:

Simukai Chigudu is associate professor of African politics at the University of Oxford and fellow of St. Antony’s College. He was previously a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. His academic monograph, The Political Life of an Epidemic: Cholera, Crisis and Citizenship Zimbabwe (Cambridge University Press, 2020), won the prestigious Theodore J. Lowi First Book Award from the International and American Political Science Associations. He holds a DPhil in International Development from the University of Oxford, for which he was awarded the Audrey Richards Prize 2018, a biennial award from the African Studies Association UK for the best thesis on Africa. Before coming into academia, he worked as a medical doctor in the NHS for three years. He was also one of the founding members of Rhodes Must Fall in Oxford, and has become a leading voice in public debates on the cultural politics of colonialism and racism. Chasing Freedom is his first trade book.

Barbara Sostaita is a writer and scholar living in Chicago. She is an assistant professor in Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago. Her first book, Sanctuary Everywhere: The Fugitive Sacred in the Sonoran Desert, is an ethnographic study of care practices on the migrant trail.

Adam Goodman is a historian and an associate professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago. He is the author of the award-winning book The Deportation Machine: America's Long History of Expelling Immigrants.

This event is sponsored by Haymarket Books. While all of our events are freely available, we ask that those who are able make a solidarity donation in support of our important publishing and programming work.