The cover work, Are We Really Free (2023), is made from shweshwe and other fabrics on canvas — a face assembled entirely from cut and layered pattern, with no two fields repeating. Shweshwe is the indigo-dyed, discharge-printed cotton long associated with Southern Africa, and Motong, who works in Soweto, Johannesburg, builds his portraits from cloth rather than paint, turning a mass-produced textile into individual likeness.

The book is the first monograph by Isabella Villanova, a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Linguistics and Literary Studies at Vrije Universiteit Brussel. It was named Joint Winner of the 2022 Peter Lang Emerging Scholars Competition in Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, in the Literature and Culture category, and appears as volume 7 in the series Race and Resistance Across Borders in the Long Twentieth Century. The study compares the work of four writers — Buchi Emecheta and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie of Nigeria, Tsitsi Dangarembga and Yvonne Vera of Zimbabwe — across twelve novels published between 1972 and 2018 and set in Nigeria, Zimbabwe, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Villanova’s stated method is to trace a pan-African route connecting those countries and periods, which makes a South African artist on the cover an extension of the book’s argument rather than an ornament on it.

Villanova, who earned her doctorate at the University of Padua and has held posts at the University of Bayreuth and the University of Vienna, credits both the artwork and the gallery in the book’s front matter, naming Are We Really Free and identifying Art House SF as the San Francisco gallery where the work was shown. The volume is catalogued by the Library of Congress, the British Library, and the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek.

Announcing the book’s release, Villanova called Motong “an outstanding artist from Soweto, South Africa.” Isabella Villanova, author

Art House SF represents roughly a dozen artists from Iceland, Japan, Georgia, South Africa, Ukraine, Nepal, and Uzbekistan. Motong’s work has been shown at the gallery since August 2022, beginning with the exhibition Faces of Soweto, and additional pieces are currently available for viewing at 2324B Market Street, Wednesday through Sunday. Are We Really Free is also available as limited-edition prints on canvas and aluminum.

Images of the cover, the original artwork, and the artist are available on request.