ABSTRACT
But just as the OED’s reference to the British imperial anthem ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ exemplifi es this narrative, so too does it draw attention to its reliance on a culturally exclusive understanding of ‘land’ (and, indeed, of ‘nation’). In other languages and for other cultures, ‘land’ holds many alternative meanings. Of particular interest to this book are those contexts in which land represents the genesis of countervailing narratives, once again described by Said:
One of the fi rst tasks of the culture of resistance was to reclaim, rename, and reinhabit the land. And with that came a whole set of
further assertions, recoveries, and identifi cations, all of them quite literally grounded on this poetically projected base. The search for authenticity, for a more congenial national origin than that provided by colonial history, for a new pantheon of heroes and (occasionally) heroines, myths, and religions-these too are made possible by a sense of the land reappropriated by its people. (273)
This critical attention to nationalist resistance in the global history of imperialism is the most important aspect of Said’s reworking, in his magnum opus, of the thesis and method behind Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City (1973). Like the literary history of England that Williams writes in that book, the modern history of land in southern Africa is indelibly marked by monumental processes of dispossession and alienation. Far more than in his study of metropolitan England, however, it also bears the imprint of the intertwined histories, pace Said, of races and nations, of resistance and contest. Across southern Africa in the twentieth century, the idea of land has been mobilised as a source of alternative nationalist narratives based on the desire for repossession-not just of land, but of the idea of land as nation: ‘the land’. This book explores how different visions of ‘the land’ are articulated in fi ctional narratives. It fi nds a range of identities deeply attached to the idea that land means much more, but also, in very important ways, often much less than the ideas of space, nation or property as conceived and prescribed by others.
