Andrew Offenburger – författare

The surprising connections between the American frontier and empire in southern Africa, and the people who participated in both“A valuable first step toward creating a global history of the concepts of the frontier, borderlands, and colonialism.”—Carol Higham, Reviews in American HistoryThis book begins in an era when romantic notions of American frontiering overlapped with Gilded Age extractive capitalism. In the late nineteenth century, the U.S.-Mexican borderlands constituted one stop of many where Americans chased capitalist dreams beyond the United States. Crisscrossing the American West, southern Africa, and northern Mexico, Andrew Offenburger examines how these frontier spaces could glitter with grandiose visions, expose the flawed and immoral strategies of profiteers, and yet reveal the capacity for resistance and resilience that indigenous people summoned when threatened. Linking together a series of stories about Boer exiles who settled in Mexico, a global network of protestant missionaries, and adventurers involved in the parallel displacements of indigenous peoples in Rhodesia and the Yaqui Indians in Mexico, Offenburger situates the borderlands of the Mexican North and the American Southwest within a global system, bound by common actors who interpreted their lives through a shared frontier ideology.Published in cooperation with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University

This book addresses the multiple repercussions of South Africa’s democratic transition beginning in 1994 by examining a number of themes with local, national, regional, and global relevance: the politics of nation building, public memory, residential segregation, higher education, media, racism, trade unionism, women’s rights, and global climate change, to name only a few.Drawing from the rich archive of previously published articles from the journal Safundi, South African Transitions documents both the country’s, and the journal’s mutual history over the past quarter century. Divided into five sections, the first part of the book explores the broad theme of South Africa’s transition to non-racial democracy by foregrounding issues of nationalism, diplomacy, rural change, social trauma, historical commemoration, and political feeling at local, national, and international levels. The second section focuses on the question of civil society, including essays on media, racism, histories of segregation, legacies of criminal violence, and comparative patterns of incarceration, underscoring the endurance of certain long-term problems and the emergence of new ones. Part three surveys the role of education in transforming South Africa, while part four situates South Africa’s opportunities and challenges within regional and global contexts to better understand the South African situation and its relationship to conditions around the world. The penultimate section has contributions that confront the present by identifying the struggles and crises of South Africa’s current political moment, including labor movements, the matter of land restitution, feminist activism, LGBTQI rights, and the Marikana Massacre of 2012. The book ends with an essay on the fire at Jagger Library at the University of Cape Town by historian Bill Nasson, a moment of contingent destruction that speaks of the Covid-19 pandemic and the burgeoning climate crisis at present.Traversing across time and place, South African Transitions will be an indispensable resource for scholars, researchers, activists and policymakers, as well as those readers who are generally interested in understanding South Africa’s social, political, and intellectual transformations over the past several decades.

This book addresses the multiple repercussions of South Africa’s democratic transition beginning in 1994 by examining a number of themes with local, national, regional, and global relevance: the politics of nation building, public memory, residential segregation, higher education, media, racism, trade unionism, women’s rights, and global climate change, to name only a few.Drawing from the rich archive of previously published articles from the journal Safundi, South African Transitions documents both the country’s, and the journal’s mutual history over the past quarter century. Divided into five sections, the first part of the book explores the broad theme of South Africa’s transition to non-racial democracy by foregrounding issues of nationalism, diplomacy, rural change, social trauma, historical commemoration, and political feeling at local, national, and international levels. The second section focuses on the question of civil society, including essays on media, racism, histories of segregation, legacies of criminal violence, and comparative patterns of incarceration, underscoring the endurance of certain long-term problems and the emergence of new ones. Part three surveys the role of education in transforming South Africa, while part four situates South Africa’s opportunities and challenges within regional and global contexts to better understand the South African situation and its relationship to conditions around the world. The penultimate section has contributions that confront the present by identifying the struggles and crises of South Africa’s current political moment, including labor movements, the matter of land restitution, feminist activism, LGBTQI rights, and the Marikana Massacre of 2012. The book ends with an essay on the fire at Jagger Library at the University of Cape Town by historian Bill Nasson, a moment of contingent destruction that speaks of the Covid-19 pandemic and the burgeoning climate crisis at present.Traversing across time and place, South African Transitions will be an indispensable resource for scholars, researchers, activists and policymakers, as well as those readers who are generally interested in understanding South Africa’s social, political, and intellectual transformations over the past several decades.

This book presents key historical scholarship published in Safundi from 1999 to 2024, tracing South Africa’s past through approaches of comparative history, transnational history, and visual history, in addition to addressing the importance of topics like gender, labor and class dynamics, as well as regional historiographies.The first section of the book focuses on comparative history as a founding method for Safundi, given the journal’s origins in American and South African studies, while also recalibrating this approach through a variety of topics—cities, biographies and practices of violence—rather than nation-states writ large. Drawing upon innovative sources of evidence, the second section moves beyond the comparative method to address transnational histories as a new narrative technique for storytelling and analysis. Whether issues of education, immigration or visiting musicians to South Africa, these chapters demonstrate the importance of a post-national approach for understanding the past. The sections that follow fan out into other subject areas, including the uses of visual history, gender roles, class cultures and environmental history, all of which illuminate connections between South African history and other parts of the world.This book will be an indispensable resource for scholars, students, activists and policymakers, as well as those readers who are generally interested in understanding South Africa’s complex history over the past several centuries.

This book offers a holistic guide as to how South African identity and culture can be understood in the past, present, and future.Drawing from the rich archive of previously published articles from the journal Safundi, South African Cultural Studies documents the mutual histories of the country and the journal over the past quarter century. Divided into six sections, the first section addresses cultural figures, including Oprah Winfrey, Trevor Noah, Olive Schreiner, and Dimitri Tsafendas - an unusual group that illustrates the unique and international character of South African culture. The second part brings attention to the important role that photography has had in depicting and narrating South African cultural life, whether through the intimacies found in recent images by Zanele Muholi or the historical work of David Goldblatt and Santu Mofokeng. The third section of the book looks at music as another idiom that has proven indispensable for South African social life with Miriam Makeba, Rodriguez, and Die Antwoord providing examples. The fourth and fifth sections of this book address sexuality and film, respectively, underscoring at once the contrasting approaches to popular culture that have surfaced in Safundi as well as their requisite abilities for grasping everyday tastes and mores. The worlds of Ms. magazine, District 9, Black Panther, and Spike Lee, to pick only several topics raised, supply ways of thinking across these chapters. The final section of the volume concludes with the role of place in the construction of culture, whether museums, national monuments, the Spur restaurant franchise, or landscapes like the Karoo.This book will be an indispensable resource for scholars, students, activists and critics, as well as readers who are generally interested in understanding South Africa’s cultural history over the past century.

The collection delves into crucial themes and debates in South African literature, addressing the innovative aesthetics of Black poetry, the political complexities of "white writing," non-fiction's significance, and the role of geography in South Africa’s regional fiction. It particularly examines how literary works have engaged with the country's evolving post-apartheid identity and its place in global contexts.South African Literary Studies: A Safundi Reader on Genre, Method, and Ideas, 1999-2024 marks the culminating volume in a series celebrating Safundi's twenty-fifth anniversary. This comprehensive collection showcases the journal's evolution from its initial focus on US-South African comparative histories to its embrace of a wider range of interdisciplinary and literary studies. Divided into seven sections, this volume explores a diverse set of literary approaches, including transnational comparisons featuring influential figures like Maya Angelou, Alan Paton, Zora Neale Hurston, and Bessie Head. It further addresses the works of poets and novelists who have shaped South African literature, including Lesego Rampolokeng, Keorapetse Kgositsile, and J. M. Coetzee, while also offering illuminating interviews with writers such as Chris Abani, C. A. Davids, and Mark Behr.Through its exploration of various genres, methods, and ideas, this volume retains Safundi's founding spirit of examining comparative and transnational connections while also demonstrating how literary criticism has become indispensable in defining South African culture and identity after apartheid.

In early March of 1915 news broke in El Paso that Leonard Worcester Jr., a leading mining executive in the border region, was being held in a Chihuahua jail without trial or release on bond. Officials loyal to Francisco “Pancho” Villa had accused Worcester of defrauding a Mexican company related to a shipment of zinc, a charge without merit. While struggling to convince Mexican officials of his innocence, Worcester found himself in the middle of a maelstrom of economic interests, foreign diplomacy, and revolution that engulfed the U.S.-Mexico border region after 1910.Worcester’s 1939 memoir of his “aimless” life describes an important period in U.S. and Mexican history from the perspective of an American miner, musician, and entrepreneur-running counter to the bombast of boosters promoting Manifest Destiny. Introduced, edited, and annotated by Andrew Offenburger, Worcester’s first-person account details the expansion of the American West, mining and labor in Colorado, the formation of reservations in Indian Territory, the Great Depression, and the everyday nature of the Mexican Revolution in Chihuahua.Worcester’s memoir, one of the few written by an American living in the Mexican borderlands during this important historical era, provides a snapshot of the capitalist development of the American West and borderlands regions in the second half of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century.Published in cooperation with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University.

The act of interpretation has been central to Western American history. At every historical juncture, interpreters were active and present-conveying meaning between people speaking mutually unintelligible languages, bartering for goods and power along borders, and translating intentions from gestures, acts, and words. While research on interpreters within zones of cultural exchange has grown among scholars of early modern Europe and Asia, the historiography of interpreters of the American West remains deficient.Translating Past to Present offers a new perspective on the historical significance of interpretation and translation. This collection explores how the current sparse historiography relates to a lack of transparency about interpretive acts, both in historical and contemporary practices, and calls attention to the subjectivity of interpretive acts and historians’ role in shaping how historical messages are represented. By summoning interpreters from the margins of history, Translating Past to Present spans broad geographies and chronologies to provide a long-overdue examination of the practices of interpretation in the American West.