South Africa's Indian Ocean – Notes from Johannesburg

Abstract

AbstractThis article reviews the emerging intersections between southern African studies and Indian Ocean studies and the broader contexts enabling this dialogue. South Africa's political transition in 1994 encouraged an interest in South African histories that moved beyond an anti‐apartheid historiography of Black and White, while post‐Cold War imperatives and the rise of transnationalism have directed attention towards post‐area studies and oceanic modes of analysis that can speak to the histories of the global south. The article surveys new work emerging at these intersections. This includes research, which inserts Indian Ocean migrant communities into older historiographies dominated by narratives of African and European; literary scholarship, which rethinks southern African literary traditions by introducing the ocean more prominently; work on transnational Muslim traditions in southern Africa; ideas of transoceanic citizenship and scholarship on southern Africans who travel into the Indian Ocean world.