Transnationalism In Southern African Literature

Considering the growing interest in South African Literature at the moment, this study looks at both the Anglophone literature of South Africa and the lusophone literature of Angola and Mozambique. Stefan Helgesson suggests that the prevalence of ‘colonial’ languages such as English and Portuguese in ‘anticolonial’ or ‘postcolonial’ African Literature is primarily an effect of the print network. Helgesson aims to demystify the authority of English and Portuguese by stressing the materiality of the print medium and emphasising the strong transnational and transcontinental vectors of southern African literature after the Second World War.

Includes statistics.

Transnational Histories of Southern Africa’s Liberation Movements offers new perspectives on southern Africa’s wars of national liberation, drawing on extensive oral historical and archival research. Assuming neither the primacy of nationalist loyalties as they exist today nor any single path to liberation, the book unpicks any notion of a straightforward imposition of Cold War ideologies or strategic interests on liberation wars. This approach adds new dimensions to the rich literatures on the Global Cold War and on solidarity movements. The contributors trace the ways that ideas and practices were made, adopted, and circulated through time and space through a focus on African soldiers, politicians and diplomats. The book also asks what motivated the men and women who crossed borders to join liberation movements, how Cold War influences were acted upon, interpreted and used, and why certain moments, venues and relations took on exaggerated importance. The connections among liberation movements, between them and their hosts, and across an extraordinarily diverse set of external actors reveal surprising exchanges and lasting legacies that have too often been obscured by the assertion of monolithic national histories. Tracing an extraordinarily diverse set of interactions and exchanges, Transnational Histories of Southern Africa’s Liberation Movements will be of great interest to scholars of Southern Africa, Transnational History, the Cold War and African Politics. The chapters were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Southern African Studies.

African Women Writing Diaspora: Transnational Perspectives in the Twenty-First Century examines contemporary fiction by African women authors to resonate diaspora perspectives on what it means to be African within transnational spaces. Through a critical lens, the collection interrogates the ways in which women construct new ways of telling the African story in the global age of social, economic, and political transformation. African Women Writing Diaspora illustrates that for African women, life in the diaspora is an uncharted journey across new landscapes of identity beyond Africa’s borders as a unifying theme. The fictional works analyzed represent the leading women writers who dominate the African literary canon, and the contributors explore diverse themes of immigrant life, racialized identities, and otherness within transnational spaces of the west.

This book examines the transcultural nature of Black and African identities, globally based on the shifting identities and experiences that have been precipitated by increased migration by Africans and African diasporans.

Despite the fact that nationalism and its national projects have in recent years been severely criticised by postcolonial theorists for being fundamentalist and essentialist; by feminists for being patriarchal and exclusive; by global financial institutions for being antagonistic to development and globalisation; by Pan-Africanists for being anticontinental unity; and by those Africans born after decolonisation for being irrelevant; Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Finex Ndhlovu's book convincingly argues that nationalism has defied its death and displayed remarkable resilience and resonance. Since the end of the Cold War, what has been poignant has been the enduring contest, tensions and contradictions between the growth of various forms of transnationalism on the one hand and a resurgence of territorial as well as other narrow and xenophobic forms of nationalism on the other. In this important book, Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Ndhlovu provide new critical reflections on nationalism and its national projects in southern Africa covering South Africa, Zimbabwe and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC, a member of SADC). The national question is interrogated from different disciplinary vantage points to reveal how it impinges on contemporary challenges of nation-building, development, devolution of power, language questions, and citizenship on the one hand and ethnicity, nativism and xenophobia on the other.

Literary Connections between South Africa and the Lusophone World connects literatures and cultures of South Africa and the Portuguese-speaking nations of Africa and beyond, and is set within literary and cultural studies. The chapters gathered in this volume reinforce the critical and ongoing conversations in comparative and world literature from perspectives of the South. It outlines some possible theoretical and methodological starting points for a comparative framework that targets, transnationally, literatures from the South. This volume is an additional step to renew the critical potentialities of comparative literary studies (Spivak 2009) as well as of humanistic criticism itself (Said 2004) as South Africa and the Lusophone world (except its former colonizer, Portugal) are outside the spatial and cultural dimension usually defined as European and/or North American. In this sense and due to the evident geographical and socio-historical links between these regions, critical scholarship on their literary connections can contribute to unprecedented perspectives of representational practices within a broader contextual dimension, and in so doing, provides the emergence of what Boaventura de Sousa Santos called “epistemologies of the South” (Santos 2016), as it considers cultural exchanges in the space of so-called “overlapping territories” and “intertwined histories” (Said 1993).

Print Culture in Southern Africa is concerned with the institutions and processes informing textual production, circulation and consumption in the region, over a broad historical period from the late 18th century to the present day. The book is organised around three closely related themes. Firstly, it presents original research into the formation of reading publics and the impact of reading cultures, by uncovering obscure but important reading communities and circuits of book distribution and reception. A second theme is the relationship between print and politics, with a particular focus on the networks of power: how control over the production and circulation of printed books has shaped literary and cultural development. The third theme is transnational print culture, and how the control exercised by publishers in Europe and America has shaped literature and society in southern Africa. Drawing together interdisciplinary research and diverse methodologies, the collection encompasses a range of perspectives, including literary studies, anthropology, publishing studies, the history of the book and art history, and many of the chapters are based on previously unexamined archives and collections. The volume contributes to current debates and opens up new and exciting ways of furthering the study of postcolonial literature and African book history. The chapters included in this book were originally published in the Journal of Southern African Studies.