John Marnell

John Marnell is a researcher at the African Centre for Migration and Overland’s copyeditor. His writing has appeared in Overland, Sexualities, History Workshop Journal and the Mail & Guardian. His recent publications include Creative Resistance: Participatory Methods for Engaging Queer Youth and Home Affairs: Rethinking LGBT Families in Contemporary South Africa. In July 2018, his latest book, Seeking Sanctuary: Sexuality, Faith and Migration will be published by MaThoko’s Books.

Articles by John Marnell:

23 March 20184 May 2018

South Africa: where ‘Australia’ is code for racist

John Marnell

I am sitting down to write this on Human Rights Day, a national holiday commemorating the 1960 Sharpeville massacre. It is a day that evokes memories of state violence and institutionalised racism, of the apartheid government’s determination to brutalise and dehumanise non-white South Africans, but it also points to more recent processes of nation-building and (as yet unrealised) healing.

Published in Overland Issue 216 Spring 2014

Imagined worlds

John Marnell

A few years back, Chimamanda Adichie warned of the dangers of a single story. In her widely viewed TED Talk, Adichie laments writers’ tendency to fall back on cliché and generalisations, to reduce the richness of real lives to familiar and, in the case of Africa, often racist tropes.