The collection delves into crucial themes and debates in South African literature, addressing the innovative aesthetics of Black poetry, the political complexities of "white writing," non-fiction's significance, and the role of geography in South Africas regional fiction.
The collection delves into crucial themes and debates in South African literature, addressing the innovative aesthetics of Black poetry, the political complexities of "white writing," non-fiction's significance, and the role of geography in South Africas regional fiction. It particularly examines how literary works have engaged with the country's evolving post-apartheid identity and its place in global contexts.
South African Literary Studies: A Safundi Reader on Genre, Method, and Ideas, 1999-2024 marks the culminating volume in a series celebrating Safundi's twenty-fifth anniversary. This comprehensive collection showcases the journal's evolution from its initial focus on US-South African comparative histories to its embrace of a wider range of interdisciplinary and literary studies. Divided into seven sections, this volume explores a diverse set of literary approaches, including transnational comparisons featuring influential figures like Maya Angelou, Alan Paton, Zora Neale Hurston, and Bessie Head. It further addresses the works of poets and novelists who have shaped South African literature, including Lesego Rampolokeng, Keorapetse Kgositsile, and J. M. Coetzee, while also offering illuminating interviews with writers such as Chris Abani, C. A. Davids, and Mark Behr.
Through its exploration of various genres, methods, and ideas, this volume retains Safundi's founding spirit of examining comparative and transnational connections while also demonstrating how literary criticism has become indispensable in defining South African culture and identity after apartheid.
Introduction
1. Growing Up with Maya Angelou and Sindiwe Magona: A
Comparison (2001)
2. Oprah's Paton, or south Africa and the Globalization of
Suffering (2006)
3. Theory and Intertextuality: Reading Zora Neale Hurston
and Bessie Head (2008)
4. South Africa, the USA, and the Globalization of
Truth and Reconciliation: Itinerant Mourning in Zakes Mda's Cion (2009)
5.
Neither History nor Freedom Will Absolve Us: On the Ethical Dimensions of the
Poetry of Lesego Rampolokeng (2011)
6. Kopano Matlwas Coconut and the
Dialectics of Race in South Africa: Interrogating Images of Whiteness and
Blackness in Black Literature and Culture (2013)
7. Conspicuous Destruction,
Aspiration and Motion in the South African Township (2013)
8. Black music and
pan-African solidarity in Keorapetse Kgositsiles poetry (2017)
9.
Metamorphosis of Xhosa masculinity in Thando Mgqolozanas A Man Who is Not a
Man (2020)
10. An Interview with Chris Abani (2009)
11. An Interview with
Mark Behr (2011)
12. Reflection, understanding, and empathy: a conversation
between Carol-Ann Davids and Patrick Flanery (2017)
13. In a Country where
You couldnt Make this Shit up?: Literary NonFiction in South Africa (2012)
14. NonFiction Booms, North and South: A Transatlantic Perspective (2012)
15. Writing Spaces: Fiction and Non-Fiction in South Africa (2012)
16.
Accounting for Language: Narrative Ethics and Economic Reparations in Antjie
Krog's Country of my Skull
17. Spectacles of Dystopia: Lauren Beukes and the
Geopolitics of Digital Space
18. A tree full of hillbillies: grotesque humor
in Marlene van Niekerks Triomf (2020)
19. Properties of Whiteness:
(Post)Apartheid Geographies in Zoė Wicomb's Playing in the Light
20.
Johannesburg Sighted: TJ/Double Negative and the Temporality of the
Image/Text (2015)
21. Coetzee's Stones: Dusklands and the nonhuman witness
22. Cold War and Hot Translation (2007)
23. The Urge to Nowhere: Wicomb and
Cosmopolitanism (2011)
24. You Are Where You Arent: Mark Behr and the
Not-Quite-Global Novel (2013)
25. The island is not a story in itself:
apartheids world literature (2018)
Christopher J. Lee has published eleven 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.
