Rethinking South Africa’s Past

<p>This book presents key historical scholarship published in <i>Safundi</i> 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.</p><p>The first section of the book focuses on comparative history as a founding method for <i>Safundi</i> 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.</p><p>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.</p>