ABSTRACT
The title of the special issues on 'San representation', published in two parts, is deliberately ambiguous. It seeks to capture both the representation of the San in various media, including academic publications, popular culture, literature, film and advertising, and also representation of various sorts by people who have been identified as San in the past, or who themselves claim such an identity today. The different disciplines offer different bodies of knowledge and modes of discourse in relation to the Khoe and the San; at the same time they also impose limits on the sorts of thinking, research and modes of interpretation that are possible. Areas of dissonance emerged in the discussions during the conference on San representation from which the articles in these two issues resulted. These are cogently presented in Keyan Tomaselli's position paper on the fissures that were in evidence.
