Nadia Joseph - Biography
Nadia Joseph has been involved in South African politics personally and professionally. The daughter of veterans of the liberation struggle, she herself worked for the Anti-Apartheid Movement in London and remains an active campaigner around issues of social justice.
She has written on politics and on cinema. Her BA dissertation was a close textual reading of race, gender and sexuality in two Neil Jordan films. Her MA thesis explored the possibility of recovery from trauma for individuals and nations in the aftermath of war through the lens of a feminist psychoanalytic analysis of the films The Night Porter and Death and The Maiden.
She worked on the publication of her father’s memoir Slumboy From The Golden City (Merlin 2018). In 2021, she conducted an oral history interview with her mother, Adelaide Joseph, who was active in the women’s section of the Transvaal Indian Congress in the 1950s and worked alongside Winnie Mandela in the Federation of South African Women. This was published by the Oral History Association of South Africa as part of a collection entitled Tell Your Mother’s Story.
Nadia works part-time at New Beacon Books, the UK’s first and oldest bookshop and publisher to specialise in books by and about people from Africa, the Caribbean and Asia as well as the diasporas who comprise contemporary Black British society. Her particular focus is educational outreach work in local schools and across London.
Nadia’s role as Research and Content Lead for The Liliesleaf Trust UK is to deliver a major pilot-programme of engagement in the heritage of the Movement Against Apartheid (MAA) as part of a National Lottery Heritage funded project. The wider aim is to expand the reach and impact of the overall TLTU programme and help prepare for a successful launch at the Centre of Memory and Learning (CML). This will be located at the newly designed former headquarters of the African National Congress (ANC) at 28 Penton Street, Islington. This site is of significance to Nadia as it was at the heart of the exiled liberation movement in the UK in which her parents played key roles.
Nadia also works on a freelance basis as an educator through an initiative Education Through Culture, as well as a writer, editor and in the trade union movement.
She lives in London, a city that she loves.