Rethinking South Africa’s Past A Safundi Reader on Comparative, Regional, and Transnational Connections, 1999-2024

Introduction
Christopher J. Lee

Part I: Comparative Histories

1. Cape Town and New Orleans: Some Comparisons (2000)
Christopher Saunders

2.Pariahs in the Land of Their Birth: Sol Plaatje and Frederick Douglass in the Search for Identity (2001)
Peter Midgley

3. The Instrument of Terror: Some Thoughts on Comparative Historiography, White Rural Unofficial Violence, and Segregation in South Africa and the American South (2003)
John Higginson and Christoph Strobel

4. Reflections on the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of the Publication of White Supremacy (2006)
George M. Fredrickson

Part II: Transnational Histories

5. Citizenship Over Race? African Americans in U.S.-South African Diplomacy, 1890–1925 (2004)
Robert Trent Vinson

6. Immigration: The Forgotten Factor in Cape Colonial Frontier Expansion, 1658 to 1817 (2005)
Robert C. H. Shell

7. Toward a “Modernizing” Hybridity: McAdoo’s Jubilee Singers, McAdoo’s Minstrels, and Racial Uplift Politics in South Africa, 1890–1898 (2014)
Chinua Akimaro Thelwell

8. “The most patient of animals, next to the ass”: Jan Smuts, Howard University, and African American Leadership, 1930 (2017)
Robert Edgar and Myra Ann Houser

Part III: Visual Histories

9. Loathing and Love: Postcard Representations of Indentured Chinese Laborers in South Africa's Reconstruction, 1904–10 (2008)
Tu T. Huynh

10. Photography and the Future in Jansje Wissema’s Images of District Six (2014)
Kylie Thomas

11. On Photographs at War: Images of the South African 6th Armored Division in Italy 1944–1945 (2014)
P.R. Anderson

Part IV: Gender Histories

12. “Like a Family”: Global Models, Familial Bonds, and the Making of an American School for Zulu Girls (2010)
Meghan Healy-Clancy

13. The Voice of (Which?) Africa: Miriam Makeba in America (2012)
April Sizemore-Barber

14. Forlorn daughters? The role of social motherhood in transnational African Methodist Episcopal missionary women networks, 1900–1940s (2018)
Claire Cooke

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)
Dawne Y. Curry

Part V: Labor Histories and Class Cultures

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)
Peter Cole and Lucien van der Walt

17. “Yours for Socialism”: Communist Cultural Discourse in Early Apartheid South Africa (2013)
Corinne Sandwith

18. Servicing “intimate publics”: Johannesburg and Baltimore department stores in the 1960s (2020)
Bridget Kenny

Part VI: Historiographies

19. Latitudes and Longitudes: Comparative Perspectives on Cape Environmental History (2004)
Nancy J. Jacobs

20. Reconstructing Zimbabwe's Past: The Professional Historians Return (2007)
Terence Ranger

21. Abolition, Violence, and Rape: Thoughts on the Post-Emancipation Experiences of the United States and the Cape Colony (2010)
R. L. Watson

22. Youth and generation in South African history (2018)
Clive Glaser

Biography

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.