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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 Africa's regional fiction.
List of contents
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 Matlwa's 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 Kgositsile's poetry (2017)
9. Metamorphosis of Xhosa masculinity in Thando Mgqolozana's 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 couldn't Make this Shit up"?: Literary Non¿Fiction in South Africa (2012)
14. Non¿Fiction 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 Niekerk's Triomf (2020)
19. Properties of Whiteness: (Post)Apartheid Geographies in Zoë 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 Aren't: Mark Behr and the Not-Quite-Global Novel (2013)
25. "The island is not a story in itself": apartheid's world literature (2018)
About the author
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.
