Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature

(Fall 2024)

Cartography and the Construction of Indigeneity: The farm, the Khoe, and the kaffir in South African Literary Landscapes draws focus on the haunting outsider, alien, and transient figure of the Black in farm literature and the re-emergence of the Black as settler adjacent in the post-apartheid revival of the Bantu migration through the indigenous revival movement. Through the book, I argue that the current indigenous revival movement in Southern Africa rehearses literary constructions of the African indigene as proverbial outsider and thus calcifies the racial logics, cartographic worldmaking, and colonial justifications for the expropriation of land. I read early maps and travelogues that shaped Portuguese, British, and Dutch expeditions, the function of anthropological scholarship on the racial indigenization of Southern Africa, and the establishment of white land ownership through farm literature. Through this mapping and a focus on the political economy of the Arabic term kaffir which translates to infidel/pariah, I engage conquest, imperial expansion and expropriation as driven by a logic of sovereignty built on an antiblack structural antagonism that repeatedly renders the ‘Black African’ a proverbial outsider. I put forward that the concepts of ‘sovereignty’ and ‘indigeneity’ exist within the lexicon of imperial conquests’ expropriation, enslavement, and mapping of the world.