Isabel Hofmeyr

The Black Atlantic Meets the Indian Ocean: Forging New Paradigms of Transnationalism for the Global South – Literary and Cultural Perspectives

Abstract With the recent transnational turn in the humanities and social sciences, questions of translocalism have come to dominate the academic agenda. Where southern African studies has engaged with transnationalism, this has generally been pursued through the framework of the black Atlantic. This article argues that we need to supplement this perspective with a systematic engagement with the Indian Ocean. The article outlines various major historiographical traditions associated with the Indian Ocean and then seeks to draw out how these themes challenge assumptions which have been theorised on the basis of black Atlantic patterns. The paper concludes with a discussion of how a consideration of the Indian Ocean would enlarge the maps of South African literary and cultural studies.

Popularizing History: the Case of Gustav Preller

Gustav Preller (1875–1943), a prolific and popular South African historian, is the man largely responsible for shaping many of the key myths of Afrikaner nationalism. One of these is the concept of the Great Trek, an interpretation of the nineteenth-century movement of Boers into the interior. It is Prellers written and visual version of this social movement that has been the dominant one for the last seven decades. Preller worked with a variety of media including books, newspapers, magazines, drama and film, and always produced works that sold in significant numbers. Yet despite his obvious impact and importance, Preller has been the subject of little research. This article attempts to assess Prellers work in relation to questions concerning the cultural fabrication of nationalisms. It asks how Preller did his popularizing work: what techniques, conventions, narrative formulas and social languages did he deploy in his work and whence did he derive these cultural resources? For Preller, one of the most crucial themes in his work had to do with how people recalled the past and more importantly how one could get them to ‘enact’ this memory in their own lives. Much of his work can be read as a search to find strategies of storing the past in forms which would make popular sense. He relied heavily on oral history and he also familiarized himself with popular forms of both oral and written storytelling which in turn inform his work. In 1916 he became involved in filming De Voortrekkers and these visual skills became a key ingredient in all of his ventures. His interest in the visual also informed his frequent use of the physical objects of the past as vehicles for popularizing his views. Another tactic that Preller followed was to explore and ‘colonize’ the institutions of popular leisure which he then remoulded in his nationalist enterprises. The article concludes with a detailed consideration of one of Prellers historical short stories.

‘Wailing for purity’: Oral studies in Southern African studies

Abstract This article gives a critical overview of recent trends and developments in the academic use of oral history. The paper focuses on some of the deep‐level assumptions guiding this work. The first of these is that the medium of the evidence — its ‘oralness’ — often confers a privileged status on the material being examined. Arising out of commonsense views of language which portray speech as authentic and intimate in contrast to the supposed deadness of print, these ideas have often privileged orality as the pure and authentic essence of national cultures. In relation to oral historiography, this valorisation of the voice manifests itself in a number of ways, one of which is that scholars view their informants as ‘oral people’ apparently untouched by literacy, media and the like. The article probes how these shortcomings can be overcome and suggests a range of methodological routes for bypassing these problems.

Introduction: Transnationalism and African Literature

Extracted from text ... ~M. . . . . . . uch scholarship in the humanities is in the process of taking a transna- tional turn. Central to these developments has been a focus on ideas of circulation. If identity is no longer shaped in static entities like nation or region, but is rather shaped by a series of global flows and pathways, then questions of transna- tional circulation become critical. Indeed ideas of mobility, migration and circulations can be considered as the methodologies of anti- or post-essentialist approaches. African literature, nationalism and transnationalism The idea of African literature has always encompassed both ..

Africa/India: Culture and circulation in the Indian Ocean

ABSTRACT Commencing with an overview of intensifying South African-Indian interactions, this article seeks to draw out the academic implications of these developments. It sketches out the post-1994 research which is emerging in the South African academy on Africa-India interactions and asks what it means for literary and cultural studies. It then surveys the papers collected in this special issue, demonstrating how they contribute to this emerging body of work on South Africa-India interactions from a literary and cultural perspective.

African history and global studies: a view from South Africa

Recent debates on global and world history have largely been shaped in the Euro-American academy, an arrangement that appears to deepen the growing divide between metropolitan and African universities. This article takes a more optimistic view arguing that twenty years of post-apartheid life has enabled a freer flow of people and ideas across the continent. These new networks have sparked projects that explore inter-regional exchanges and transnational circuits within the continent. These developments coincide with the ‘rise of the south’ and present an opportunity for new styles of world history that take the global south as their matrix. This article examines a range of such projects and draws out their wider significance.

South Africa’s Indian Ocean: Boer prisoners of war in India

During the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902), the British transported Boer prisoners of war to St Helena, Ceylon, India and Bermuda. This article examines the 9000 POWs who were sent to India. Rather than considering them only within the historiography of the South African War (where as failed soldiers they occupy a marginal position), the article places these POWs in the growing Indian Ocean scholarship. This historiography has generated a rich research on forced migration in the Indian Ocean world and the article argues that the Boer POWs can be located within this scholarship. A second strand of Indian Ocean work focuses on the rich transnational experimental imaginings engendered by the epic imperial mobility of the nineteenth century. The ways in which the Boer POWs were (or are) categorised (citizens of the Boer republics, British subjects in the making, imperials citizens, white nationalists, South Africans, etc) can usefully be included in this transnational Indian Ocean historiography.

The book in Africa

In an interview “with himself”, Dambudzo Marechera recalls some childhood memories about reading and writing in Rusape, the small Rhodesian town where he was born. ...there was the rubbish dump where they dumped the garbage from the white sections of the town – a very small-minded very racist town. I scratched around in the rubbish with other kids, looking for comics, magazines, books, broken toys, anything that could help us kids pass the time in the ghetto. But for me it was the reading material that was important. You could say my very first books were the books which the rabidly racist Rusape whites were reading at the time. Ha-ha my most prized possession was a tattered Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopedia – very British Empire orientated and nonetheless a treasure of curious facts about the universe and the earth. There were jingoistic British Second World War comics. Superman. Batman. Spiderman. Super this, super that. Mickey Spillane, James Hadley Chase, Peter Cheyne, Tarzan things and Tarzan thongs. I had these two friends, Washington and Wattington, twins. They had built ‘offices’ of mud and tin and cardboard, offices about two and a half feet high. They had a children’s typewriter. They were the Chairman and General Manager. I was the office boy. We had a library there – of books and comics salvaged from the dump. Every day it was the rubbish dump – and then the office. Washington typed down meticulous records of each day’s acquisitions. See what I mean? There was the typewriter, there were these books. After school everyday that was what we did. (Veit-Wild 1992:2-3)

Styling multilateralism: Indian Ocean cultural futures

The Indian Ocean has long been held to be an important arena for bringing lateral, south-south links into view and hence for theorising the Global South. Yet, how is this vast and abstract idea being given substance in the Indian Ocean world? This article approaches this question from a cultural direction, looking at various cultural formations that address themselves to the Global South. The article makes sense of this material by sorting it into three traditions, high, low and in-between. The first is dominated by themes of mourning and nostalgia for the lost utopias of the third world. By contrast, the low tradition works with idioms of popular culture: slapstick, comedy, consumer excess. If the ‘high’ tradition deals in epic, and the ‘low’ tradition in comedy, then the ‘in-between’ tradition takes account of both, relativising romantic accounts of south-south solidarity as it traces the faultlines within the south.

The Globe in the Text1: Towards a Transnational History of the Book

As a field of enquiry, the history of the book has produced a long and distinguished tradition of scholarship. In the words of one of its leading practitioners, Roger Chartier, its major focus has been three-fold, namely to understand “the text, the material object which conveys it, and the act which grasps it” (1989:161). This triptych of issues has prompted a rich archive of investigation into all aspects of the materiality of the book and its import for the social and aesthetic meanings of texts (see for example Cavallo and Chartier 1999; Finkelstein and McCleery 2002; Gupta and Chakravorty 2004).