Author: portiz

This event is
supported by a generous
Interdisciplinary Group grant from the Penn State Institute for the Arts and
Humanities.

Migration Studies Project

Fall Distinguished Lecture Isabel Hofmeyr, Ph.D. Professor of African Literature, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa

"Seeking Empire, Finding Nation:
Gandhi and Indianness in South Africa"
October 18, 2010 5:00 p.m.
220 Hammond

Abstract::
Using Gandhi’s 21 year sojourn in South Africa, this paper examines his ideas on political community as taking shape in a world of empires, princely states, colonies, republics, chiefdoms and kingdoms. Asian migrants had to manoeuvre between these political systems as best they could, an experience that produced a range of experimental modes of belonging, many of which disappear from view as the nation state takes hold and produces its own hindsight.
The political horizons against which these intersections took shape were those of empire, an ideal to which Gandhi remained deeply wedded even as ideals of imperial citizenship evaporated before his eyes. His response to these changing circumstances was less that of anti-colonial nationalism than a set of manoeuvres around the categories of imperial authority, white settlers, ‘Africans’ and ‘Indians’ in which versions of a nation emerge as a strategy for trying to salvage ideas of empire.
This paper uses this material to contemplate on recent work from scholars See Seng Tan, Amitav Acharya, Antoinette Burton, Christopher Lee which revisits questions of Afro-Asian interaction by exploring the hitherto unrecognized diversity of forms of transnational political community that emerge within this arena. This work in turn has important consequences for rethinking older ideas of diaspora.

Isabel Hofmeyr is Professor of African Literature at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. Her first monograph We Spend our Years as a Tale that is Told: Oral Historical Narrative in a South African Chiefdom (1994) was shortlisted for the Herskovits Prize. The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of the Pilgrim's Progress won the 2007 Richard L. Greaves Award from the International John Bunyan Society. Until last year, she was acting director for the Centre of Indian Studies in Africa (www.cisa-wits.org). She is currently working on textual circulation in the Indian Ocean.

For additional information, contact: Professor Suresh Canagarajah Director, Migration Studies
Project asc16@psu.edu

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