ABSTRACT
On the occasion of the adoption of the new constitution, then-Deputy President Thabo Mbeki presented an image of Africa-and South Africa in particular-as cut across and comprised by oceanic passages. This chapter begins to sketch the ways in which such movements, and the literary texts that retrace their passages, introduce into South African cultural studies the Indian Ocean paradigm (previously occluded in favour of autochthonous or Atlantic paradigms) and defl ect attention away from the agonistic relationship with the North or West (depending on one’s location) that marks much cultural production in the so-called postcolonial world.1 Docking on the exclusionary shores of erstwhile white South Africa, such passagesoceanic and literary-hone analytic tools with which to meet a xenophobia, articulated fi rst in apartheid racism (which cast Africans as “strangers” in their own land, and Asians as foreigners to be repatriated) and now transmuted into hostility towards continental Africans and Asians, rearing its ugly head in the postapartheid present. In this present, casting one’s
gaze back across the ocean raises pertinent questions around home, belonging, and Africanness that help to move us beyond the bankrupt politics of autochthony2 and gesture towards ways of imagining the nation anew: no longer in terms of the “closed doors” that the metaphor of the national home encapsulates,3 but rather as a ship coming to port in a diverse range of harbours bordering the fl uid territory of the Indian Ocean world.
