This book offers a holistic guide as to how South African identity and culture can be understood in the past, present, and future.
Drawing from the rich archive of previously published articles from the journal Safundi, South African Cultural Studies documents the mutual histories of the country and the journal over the past quarter century. Divided into six sections, the first section addresses cultural figures, including Oprah Winfrey, Trevor Noah, Olive Schreiner, and Dimitri Tsafendas - an unusual group that illustrates the unique and international character of South African culture. The second part brings attention to the important role that photography has had in depicting and narrating South African cultural life, whether through the intimacies found in recent images by Zanele Muholi or the historical work of David Goldblatt and Santu Mofokeng. The third section of the book looks at music as another idiom that has proven indispensable for South African social life with Miriam Makeba, Rodriguez, and Die Antwoord providing examples. The fourth and fifth sections of this book address sexuality and film, respectively, underscoring at once the contrasting approaches to popular culture that have surfaced in Safundi as well as their requisite abilities for grasping everyday tastes and mores. The worlds of Ms. magazine, District 9, Black Panther, and Spike Lee, to pick only several topics raised, supply ways of thinking across these chapters. The final section of the volume concludes with the role of place in the construction of culture, whether museums, national monuments, the Spur restaurant franchise, or landscapes like the Karoo.
This book will be an indispensable resource for scholars, students, activists and critics, as well as readers who are generally interested in understanding South Africas cultural history over the past century.
This book offers a holistic guide as to how South African identity and culture can be understood in the past, present, and future. Drawing from the rich archive of previously published articles from the journal Safundi, this book documents the mutual histories of the country and the journal over the past quarter century.
Introduction
1. Soaring on the Wings of Pride: Martin Luther King Jr.
and the New South Africa (2004)
2. Oprah in South Africa: The Politics of
Coevalness and the Creation of a Black Public Sphere (2007)
3. The
Transnational Circulation of Dissent: Olive Schreiner and the Colonial
Counter-flows of Unitarian Freethinking (2013)
4. The Political and
Intellectual World of Bernard Makhosozwe Magubane (19302013) (2015)
5.
Visions of Tsafendas: Literary Biography and the Limits of Research (2015)
6. Gaining currency confession comedy and the economics of racial ambiguity
in Trevor Noah s Born a Crime (2021)
7. Resistance, Memory, and Hope: The
Photographic Art of Peter Magubane (2005)
8. Zanele Muholi's Intimate
Archive: Photography and Post-apartheid Lesbian Lives (2010)
9. Being (2010)
10. Santu Mofokeng: Alternative Ways of Seeing (19962013) (2014)
11.
Reframing the Afrikaner Subject: The Visual Grammar of David Goldblatt and
Roelof van Wyk (2014)
12. Re-collecting the Musical Politics of John and
Nokutela Dube (2012)
13. Part II: Zef/Poor White Kitsch Chique: Die
Antwoord's Comedy of Degradation (2012)
14. The South African Life and
Afterlife of Jim Reeves (2014)
15. A Marriage of Inconvenience: Miriam
Makebas relationship with Stokely Carmichael (2016)
16. Rodriguez,
apartheid, and censorship: cold facts, and fiction (2021)
17. Caster Semenya:
Gods and Monsters (2010)
18. A peculiar place for a feminist? The New South
African woman, True Love magazine and Lebo(gang) Mashile (2016)
19. Queer
politics and intersectionality in South Africa (2017)
20. The
gender-apartheid analogy in the transnational feminist imaginary: Ms.
Magazine and the Feminist Majority Foundation, 1972-2002 (2018)
21. Yearning
for rootedness in a femicidal landscape (2021)
22. Anti-Apartheid Solidarity
Networks and the Production of Come Back, Africa (2015)
23. The D Is Silent:
Django Unchained and the African American West (2015)
24. Zones of
indistinction and visions of post reconciliation South Africa in District 9
(2017)
25. Between the world and Wakanda (2019)
26. Spike Lee, Do the Right
Thing and the cultural boycott of apartheid South Africa (2019)
27. A Taste
for Strife; or, Spur in the South African Imaginary (2015)
28. The Karoo and
eco-inflections of fracking: preliminary notes on literary imagination (2017)
29. Uncertain objects and ethnographic possibilities thinking through the
Smithsonian Universal African Expedition (2020)
30. This is the Place: Salt
Lake City, Utah, and the Voortrekker Monument, Pretoria: monuments to settler
constructions of history race and religion (2021)
31. Contradictory
excessiveness: abandoned trolleys in post-apartheid South Africa (2021)
Christopher J. Lee has published ten books, including Making a World after Empire: The Bandung Moment and Its Political Afterlives (2010, rev. 2nd edition 2019), Unreasonable Histories: Nativism, Multiracial Lives, and the Genealogical Imagination in British Africa (2014), Frantz Fanon: Toward a Revolutionary Humanism (2015), Kwame Anthony Appiah (2021), and Alex La Guma: The Exile Years, 1966-1985 (2024). He is currently the Lead Editor of Safundi.
Andrew Offenburger is Associate Professor of History at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He is author of Frontiers in the Gilded Age: Adventure, Capitalism, and Dispossession from Southern Africa to the U.S.-Mexican Borderlands, 1880-1917 (Yale University Press, 2019), and is co-editor with Patricia Nelson Limerick on the forthcoming Translating Past to Present: Interpreters in the American West and Beyond (University of Nebraska Press). He is the Founding Editor of Safundi.
