1999
		quarterly
		English
		Humanities and Social Sciences
		1543-1304
		Routledge (Taylor and Francis)

Lead Editor: Andrew van der Vlies - Queen Mary University of London, UK Editors: Shane Graham - Utah State University, USA Karin Shapiro - Duke University, USA Reviews Editors: Derek Catsam - University of Texas of the Permian Basin, USA Annel Pieterse - University of the Western Cape, South Africa Monica Popescu - McGill University, Canada Tiffany Willoughby-Herard - University of California, Irvine, USA International Editorial Board: Rita Barnard - University of Pennsylvania, USA Louise Bethlehem - Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel Kerry Bystrom - Bard College, USA/Germany Carrol Clarkson - University of Amsterdam, Netherlands Nadia Davids - University of Cape Town, South Africa Michele Elam - Stanford University, USA Norman Etherington - University of Western Australia, Australia Jeremy Foster - Cornell University, USA Albert Grundling - University of Stellenbosch, South Africa Rick Halpern - University of Toronto, Canada Stefan Helgesson - Stockholm University, Sweden Jon Hyslop - Colgate University, USA Tsitsi Jaji - Duke University, USA Christopher J. Lee - Lafayette College, USA Simon Lewis - College of Charleston, USA Alex Lichtenstein - Indiana University Bloomington, USA Peter Limb - Michigan State University, USA Zine Magubane - Boston College, USA Mandisa Mbali - University of Stellenbosch, South Africa David Chioni Moore - Macalester College, USA Brenna Munro - University of Miami, USA Dana Phillips - Towson University, USA Peter Rachleff - Macalester College, USA Pallavi Rastogi - Louisiana State University, USA Stéphane Robolin - Rutgers University, USA Steven Robins - University of Stellenbosch, South Africa Christopher Saunders - University of Cape Town, South Africa Thula Simpson - University of Pretoria, South Africa Michael Titlestad - University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa Hedley Twidle - University of Cape Town, South Africa Robert Vinson - College of William and Mary, USA Jennifer Wenzel - Columbia University, USA Luvuyo Wotshela - University of Fort Hare, South Africa Founding Editor: Andrew Offenburger - Yale University, USA
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Safundi Publications P.O. Box 206788 New Haven, CT 06520 (203) 548-9155 / Phone (203) 548-9177 / Fax info@safundi.com

Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies

Safundi -- "S" represents "South Africa," "a" stands for "America," and "fundi" comes from the Xhosa verb, "-funda," which translates as "to read/learn." Safundi is an online community of scholars, professionals, and others interested in comparing and contrasting the United States of America with the Republic of South Africa. Our journal, Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies, is the centerpiece of our online community. We believe that analyzing the two countries in a comparative and transnational context enhances our perspective on each, individually. While new comparative research is the focus of the journal, we also publish articles specifically addressing one country, provided the articles are of interest to the comparative scholar. Furthermore, our subject matter is as permeable as any country's border: we will consider research addressing other colonial and postcolonial states in Southern Africa and North America. Articles that Safundi publishes are academic in nature. Research papers are reviewed as they are submitted. Scholarly essays are welcomed. Any topic may be addressed. We hope to provide our readers with a diverse and insightful collection of articles in each issue. We publish on a quarterly basis. Our journal is peer-reviewed. Submissions are vetted by the editors-in-chief and the editorial board before they are accepted for publication. The views expressed in the articles are those of the authors and not of the editors or of Safundi itself.

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Deterritorializing American Culture, 23

This collection of articles approaches “America” and “South Africa” as diasporic and translational phenomena.

An Introduction to Issue 23: Deterritorializing American Culture

By Rita Barnard
This introduction summarizes the collective concerns of the essays in this volume and suggests that they are ultimately best captured in the notion of "deterritorialization": a consideration of cultural products as they are exported or interpretively wrested away from their geographic origins and from their "natural" context in any sort of unilinear national narrative. It also describes the origins of this issue. The initial idea was create a counterpart to an earlier issue of Safundi, which featured reflections on the way South African history, culture, and politics is presented at U.S. universities. The editors therefore set out by asking a number of South African scholars, many of them in English departments, to reflect on the way in which U.S. culture was taught in South Africa. It soon emerged, however, that a strictly pedagogical focus was too constricting to generate a rich collection. While several of the articles in this issue do include reflections on pedagogy, the collection as a whole now presents a broader consideration of the nature of U.S.-South African cultural exchange. It leaves one with a sense that that the near-absence of American studies in the formal curriculum in South Africa has produced a need for methodological inventiveness and a desire to examine matters that are often ignored in academia. These include not only popular culture, but also the complicated, intimate, and often undisclosed relationship of the scholar to the subject of his or her research: the personal and political reasons behind his or her intellectual and imaginative engagement. This collection, in sum, approaches "America" and "South Africa" as diasporic and translational phenomena.

The Un-Americanness of American Literature

By David Watson
Taking stock of recent trends in American studies, Watson uses Malcolm Lowry's neglected novel Lunar Caustic (1968) as an entry point into an exploration of the implications for readers and teachers of movements in American studies in a transnational direction. He argues that Lowry's novel can be read as a precursor and allegory of current attempts to position American studies and culture within a transnational and cosmopolitan network: Lowry re-imagines and re-interprets American literature and popular culture without centralizing and naturalizing their relationship with the cultural and national imaginaries of the American nation-state. Instead, American culture is depicted as a component of a transnational system, which constitutes and determines America as much as it, in turn, is modulated by the globalization of American culture. Lowry's novel maps and foregrounds this transnational terrain, constituted by a series of reciprocal movements between the local and the global, and challenges thereby a pedagogy grounded in the area studies model of literary scholarship.

American Musical Surrogracy: A View from Post-World War II South Africa

By Carol A. Muller
In this paper Muller asks the question what exactly was "American" about music made in and by Americans distributed globally as "popular" music in the twentieth century by examining the migration of this music in the post-World War II era. In this narrative, "American" music is deterritorialized by commoditization and at times might also be thought of as a diasporic entity. "Diasporic" here refers to the dispersion of musical commodities rather than living musicians into global networks of distribution and consumption. These commodities bear the personal and collective histories of their makers to consumers: to people who often live elsewhere, but share a social position similar to that of those who make the music. In their places of destination these commodities frequently convey feelings of intimacy, immediacy, even personal presesnce through the medium of music recorded in distant centers of cultural production but purchased and broadcast locally. What distinguishes a generalized global circulation of musical commodities from a "diasporic" one is the way in which musical objects are humanized by consumers who felt that the recording or radio broadcast was merely a substitute or surrogate for the real voices and instrumental performances of living musicians not able to travel in person. The media of transmission stands in for, or represents the original musicians in their absence, much as a woman surrogate substitutes her body for the body of another in giving birth to a child. "American music" is thus a transitional or translational phenomenon.

Home on the Range: The Americanization of my Father

By Lesley Marx
In this article, Marx explores the social and historical roots of her family's attachment to country and western music. Specifically, she examines the influence of American popular culture on her father, born to a large Afrikaans family, and informed by film, musical and pulp fiction stories of the west. These stories have helped to frame the way in which he reads his life story. She suggests that her father's experience offers flexible ways of analyzing the impact of American cultural forms on certain kinds of South Africans while also giving a new perspective on how those forms might be read in contexts beyond the places that gave birth to them.

The Tiny Skin Boat: Visiting Gary Snyder in “Amerika”

By Julia Martin
This is a narrative essay which reflects on a visit to the United States in 2005 to interview Gary Snyder and attend a conference on literature and ecology. The speaker describes teaching Snyder's poetry in South Africa as part of an attempt to develop an approach to reading and writing that conveys a sense of the urgency of environmental issues, and of their implicatedness in social and political ones. Meeting him again serves to confirm and to some extent complicate the committment to these priorities.

Oprah’s Paton, or South Africa and the Globalization of Suffering

By Rita Barnard
This article emerges from the author's work for Oprah.com: the website of Harpo Inc., Oprah Winfrey's vast multinational media corporation. From December 2003 to January 2004, Barnard served as the official "literary guide" to members of Oprah's Book Club as they made their way through Alan Paton's novel Cry, the Beloved Country. The essay meditates on this most recent chapter in this "hypercanonical" book's transnational reception. Barnard agrues that, as mediated by Oprah, Cry, the Beloved Country is no longer the problematic, urbophobic "Jim Goes to Joburg" story that South African readers (including such important figures as Esk'ia Mphahlele, Stephen Watson, Tony Morphet, and J.M. Coetzee) have often subjected to sharp critique. It is transformed into an "Oprah" product: a narrative in which "the glamour of misery," as Eva Illouz has termed Oprah's chief stock-in-trade, generates a highly sentimental and commercialized form of global thinking and feeling. The essay closes with a series of reflections on the general implications of Oprah's Paton for future studies of literary reception. While Barnard is hesitant to entirely reject Oprah Winfrey's form of empathetic globalization (it is clearly preferable to the globalization of greed, revenge, and religious polarization sponsored by the Bush administration), it is nevertheless, in her view, inseparable from voyeurism and profit and is far too closely tied to a therapeutic feel-good mode of consumption to be ethical in any serious sense. Though a singular media event, the "Americanization" of this South African novel under the auspices of Oprah's Book Club tells us much about the instability of cultural products as they make the South-North or North-South passage across the Atlantic.

Other Issues

July 2013, Volume 14, Number 3
April 2007, Volume 8, Number 2
January 2007, Volume 8, Number 1
Safundi Issue 22, Issue 22
George Fredrickson's White Supremacy , Issue 21
October 2005, Issue 20
July 2005, Issue 19
April 2005, Issue 18
January 2005, Issue 17
October 2004, Issue 16
July 2004, Issue 15
April 2004, Issue 13-14
October 2003, Issue 12
July 2003, Issue 11
April 2003, Issue 10
May 2002, Issue 09
February 2002, Issue 08
November 2001, Issue 07
July 2001, Issue 06
April 2001, Issue 05
January 2001, Issue 04
October 2000, Issue 03
July 2000, Issue 02