Contaminations and Ethnographic Fictions Southern Crossings

In an unusual merging of academic and literary practices, this volume attempts to identify a form (or forms) that is congenial with the subject of interrogation: the world in transition, with South Africa as the main focal point. Approaching anthropology from the position of the literary writer, Oscar Hemer here takes the reader through a kaleidoscope of  perspectives—a stream-of-consciousness understanding of “writing the city” of Johannesburg, embedding ethnography in subjectivity; a challenge to binaries both temporal and gendered in examining the growth of the IT metropolis Bangalore to a combusting mega-city; an auto-ethnographic interweaving of fictional reportage with a close-reading of anthropological and philosophical treatises, including Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger and Edouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation, among others—to interrogate themes of transition, identity, purity and variation in the Western Cape. As the form transcends boundaries to create a methodological hybrid, creolization comes to the fore as a theoretical concept and as cultural practice.

Contaminations

Hillbrow Blues

Bengaluru Boogie

Cape Calypso I

Cape Calypso Interlude

Cape Calypso II

Melville Medley.

Oscar Hemer is Professor of Journalistic and Literary Creation at Malmö University, Sweden. He is the author of several novels, including Misiones (2014), which concludes his Argentina trilogy begun with Cosmos Aska (2000) and Santiago (2007). His academic work includes the co-edited anthology Memory on Trial and the co-edited collection Conviviality at the Crossroads.