Rethinking South Africa’s Past

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.

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.