South African Literary Studies

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. It particularly examines how literary works have engaged with the country's evolving post-apartheid identity and its place in global contexts.

South African Literary Studies: A Safundi Reader on Genre, Method, and Ideas, 1999-2024 marks the culminating volume in a series celebrating Safundi's twenty-fifth anniversary. This comprehensive collection showcases the journal's evolution from its initial focus on US-South African comparative histories to its embrace of a wider range of interdisciplinary and literary studies. Divided into seven sections, this volume explores a diverse set of literary approaches, including transnational comparisons featuring influential figures like Maya Angelou, Alan Paton, Zora Neale Hurston, and Bessie Head. It further addresses the works of poets and novelists who have shaped South African literature, including Lesego Rampolokeng, Keorapetse Kgositsile, and J. M. Coetzee, while also offering illuminating interviews with writers such as Chris Abani, C. A. Davids, and Mark Behr.

Through its exploration of various genres, methods, and ideas, this volume retains Safundi's founding spirit of examining comparative and transnational connections while also demonstrating how literary criticism has become indispensable in defining South African culture and identity after apartheid.

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, Oxford, USA. 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.