Imagining the Cape Colony: History, Literature, and the South African Nation

by David Johnson

Overview

This volume explores how the Cape Colony was imagined as a political community by considering a variety of writers, from major European literati and intellectuals (Cam es, Southey, Rousseau, Adam Smith), to well-known travel writers like Fran ois Levaillant and Lady Anne Barnard, to figures on the margins of colonial histories, like settler rebels, slaves and early African nationalists. Complementing the analyses of these primary texts are discussions of the many subsequent literary works and histories of the Cape Colony.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780748650897
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	12/07/2011
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

David Johnson is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Literature at the The Open University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Introduction

1. Remembering the Khoikhoi victory over Dom Francisco d'Almeida at the Cape in 1510: Luiz de Cam es and Robert Southey
2. French Representations of the Cape 'Hottentots': Jean Tavernier, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Fran ois Levaillant
3. The Scottish Enlightenment and colonial governance: Adam Smith, John Bruce, and Lady Anne Barnard
4. African Land for the American Empire: John Adams, Benjamin Stout, and Robert Semple
5. Historical and literary re-iterations of Dutch Settler Republicanism
6. Literature and Cape Slavery
7. History and the Griqua Nation: Andries Waterboer and Hendrick Hendricks

Conclusion
Index

What People are Saying About This

This is an outstandingly insightful and innovative study. David Johnson singlehandedly opens up new research terrains by challenging current orthodoxies about literary and historical representation and he brings the early Cape Colony into the centre of contemporary debates about identity, power and the pervasive presence of inequality in post-apartheid South Africa.

Benita Parry

The excitement of reading this book is in its delivering more than the title indicates. Grounded in meticulous historical research, Johnson’s work engages with contemporary debates about the nation, offering the innovative argument that colonial forms of nationhood and nationalism, resisted/subverted/even ignored normative concepts developed in the northern hemisphere.

Nigel Worden

This is an outstandingly insightful and innovative study. David Johnson singlehandedly opens up new research terrains by challenging current orthodoxies about literary and historical representation and he brings the early Cape Colony into the centre of contemporary debates about identity, power and the pervasive presence of inequality in post-apartheid South Africa.

Editorial Reviews

Johnson constructs a melancholic narrative of exploitation and subjugation which (as his present-day framing texts are used to prove) has merely taken on new disguises...Troubling this framing is the diversity of national, colonial and textual perspectives employed in Johnson’s both interesting and contestable construction of the imaginings of the region.

Journal of Postcolonial Writing - Annie Gagiano

Written in an admirably clear and succinct style, Imagining the Cape Colony is an important book, with which every scholar of South Africa’s history and literature should engage. It opens up many new avenues for research, while providing a sober reminder of the vast amount of work that still needs to be done to truly transform South Africa, and of the disturbing ways in which history can be perverted.

Journal of Southern African Studies, 40:4 - Gerald Groenewald

Imagining the Cape Colony sustains a clear argument without overstating its case, and its selective focus highlights moments of Cape history with authentic reverberations in the present. We seem always to be looking to the future for where we want to be, but perhaps, David Johnson suggests, we should look in our past and in our imaginations. Our history offers many examples of flexible, tolerant and just community, which we can learn from, even on the national scale. 2014 is the twentieth anniversary of South African non-racial nationhood, and we have much to celebrate, including this rich and generous book, which nonetheless offers a critique of any triumphalism or complacency in the rhetoric of the currently ruling party.

Transformation - Tony Voss

The excitement of reading this book is in its delivering more than the title indicates. Grounded in meticulous historical research, Johnson’s work engages with contemporary debates about the nation, offering the innovative argument that colonial forms of nationhood and nationalism, resisted/subverted/even ignored normative concepts developed in the northern hemisphere.

Benita Parry

This is an outstandingly insightful and innovative study. David Johnson singlehandedly opens up new research terrains by challenging current orthodoxies about literary and historical representation and he brings the early Cape Colony into the centre of contemporary debates about identity, power and the pervasive presence of inequality in post-apartheid South Africa.

Nigel Worden