Rethinking South Africa's Past
A Safundi Reader on Comparative, Regional, and Transnational Connections, 1999-2024
1st Edition
Published on 18. March 2025
Book
Hardback
448 pages
978-1-032-70935-2 (ISBN)
Description
This book presents key historical scholarship published in Safundi from 1999 to 2024, tracing South Africa's past through approaches of comparative history, transnational history, and visual history, in addition to addressing the importance of topics like gender, labor and class dynamics, as well as regional historiographies.
The first section of the book focuses on comparative history as a founding method for Safundi, given the journal's origins in American and South African studies, while also recalibrating this approach through a variety of topics-cities, biographies and practices of violence-rather than nation-states writ large. Drawing upon innovative sources of evidence, the second section moves beyond the comparative method to address transnational histories as a new narrative technique for storytelling and analysis. Whether issues of education, immigration or visiting musicians to South Africa, these chapters demonstrate the importance of a post-national approach for understanding the past. The sections that follow fan out into other subject areas, including the uses of visual history, gender roles, class cultures and environmental history, all of which illuminate connections between South African history and other parts of the world.
This book will be an indispensable resource for scholars, students, activists and policymakers, as well as those readers who are generally interested in understanding South Africa's complex history over the past several centuries.
The first section of the book focuses on comparative history as a founding method for Safundi, given the journal's origins in American and South African studies, while also recalibrating this approach through a variety of topics-cities, biographies and practices of violence-rather than nation-states writ large. Drawing upon innovative sources of evidence, the second section moves beyond the comparative method to address transnational histories as a new narrative technique for storytelling and analysis. Whether issues of education, immigration or visiting musicians to South Africa, these chapters demonstrate the importance of a post-national approach for understanding the past. The sections that follow fan out into other subject areas, including the uses of visual history, gender roles, class cultures and environmental history, all of which illuminate connections between South African history and other parts of the world.
This book will be an indispensable resource for scholars, students, activists and policymakers, as well as those readers who are generally interested in understanding South Africa's complex history over the past several centuries.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Taylor & Francis Ltd
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Postgraduate, Undergraduate Advanced, and Undergraduate Core
Dimensions
Height: 250 mm
Width: 175 mm
Thickness: 29 mm
Weight
974 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-032-70935-2 (9781032709352)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Christopher J. Lee | Andrew Offenburger
Rethinking South Africa's Past
A Safundi Reader on Comparative, Regional, and Transnational Connections, 1999-2024
Book
approx. 07/2026
1st Edition
Routledge
€57.50
Not yet published
Christopher J. Lee | Andrew Offenburger
Rethinking South Africa's Past
A Safundi Reader on Comparative, Regional, and Transnational Connections, 1999-2024
E-Book
03/2025
1st Edition
Routledge
€73.99
Available for download
Christopher J. Lee | Andrew Offenburger
Rethinking South Africa's Past
A Safundi Reader on Comparative, Regional, and Transnational Connections, 1999-2024
E-Book
03/2025
1st Edition
Routledge
€73.99
Available for download
Persons
Christopher J. Lee has published eight 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 ( 2019), and is co-editor with Patricia Nelson Limerick on the forthcoming Translating Past to Present: Interpreters in the American West and Beyond. He is the Founding 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 ( 2019), and is co-editor with Patricia Nelson Limerick on the forthcoming Translating Past to Present: Interpreters in the American West and Beyond. He is the Founding Editor of Safundi.
Content
Introduction 1. Cape Town and New Orleans: Some Comparisons (2000) 2.Pariahs in the Land of Their Birth: Sol Plaatje and Frederick Douglass in the Search for Identity (2001) 3. The Instrument of Terror: Some Thoughts on Comparative Historiography,White Rural Unofficial Violence, and Segregation in South Africa and the American South (2003) 4. Reflections on the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of the Publication of White Supremacy (2006) 5. Citizenship Over Race? African Americans in U.S.-South African Diplomacy, 1890-1925 (2004) 6. Immigration: The Forgotten Factor in Cape Colonial Frontier Expansion, 1658 to 1817 (2005) 7. Toward a "Modernizing" Hybridity: McAdoo's Jubilee Singers, McAdoo's Minstrels, and Racial Uplift Politics in South Africa, 1890-1898 (2014) 8. "The most patient of animals, next to the ass": Jan Smuts, Howard University, and African American Leadership, 1930 (2017) 9. Loathing and Love: Postcard Representations of Indentured Chinese Laborers in South Africa's Reconstruction, 1904-10 (2008) 10. Photography and the Future in Jansje Wissema's Images of District Six (2014) 11. On Photographs at War: Images of the South African 6th Armored Division in Italy 1944-1945 (2014) 12. "Like a Family": Global Models, Familial Bonds, and the Making of an American School for Zulu Girls (2010) 13. The Voice of (Which?) Africa: Miriam Makeba in America (2012) 14. Forlorn daughters? The role of social motherhood in transnational African Methodist Episcopal missionary women networks, 1900-1940s (2018) 15. "What is it that We Call the Nation": Cecilia Lillian Tshabalala's definition, diagnosis, and prognosis of the nation in a segregated South Africa (2018) 16. Crossing the Color Lines, Crossing the Continents: Comparing the Racial Politics of the IWW in South Africa and the United States, 1905-1925 (2011) 17. "Yours for Socialism": Communist Cultural Discourse in Early Apartheid South Africa (2013) 18. Servicing "intimate publics": Johannesburg and Baltimore department stores in the 1960s (2020) 19. Latitudes and Longitudes: Comparative Perspectives on Cape Environmental History (2004) 20. Reconstructing Zimbabwe's Past: The Professional Historians Return (2007) 21. Abolition, Violence, and Rape: Thoughts on the Post-Emancipation Experiences of the United States and the Cape Colony (2010) 22. Youth and generation in South African history (2018)