Overview
- A profound literary examination of the anthropology of identity
- Probes various kinds of boundaries in a kaleidoscopic text, examining intersections of identity both cultural/collective and personal/subjective
- A complex examination of question of race, racialization, and creolization in South Africa and the world at large
Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology (PSLA)
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Table of contents (8 chapters)
Keywords
About this book
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.
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
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.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Contaminations and Ethnographic Fictions
Book Subtitle: Southern Crossings
Authors: Oscar Hemer
Series Title: Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34925-7
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Social Sciences, Social Sciences (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-34924-0Published: 07 January 2020
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-34927-1Published: 08 January 2021
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-34925-7Published: 06 January 2020
Series ISSN: 2946-4218
Series E-ISSN: 2946-4226
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XV, 220
Number of Illustrations: 1 b/w illustrations, 5 illustrations in colour
Topics: Social Anthropology, Social Structure, Social Inequality, Cultural Studies, Postcolonial/World Literature