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This essay makes a case for the categories of littoral literature and coastal form through which it aims to take up the expansive possibilities of the maritime turn while keeping both the materiality of the ocean and the locality of the shore in sight. It elaborates the notion of coastal form through a focus on the African Indian Ocean littoral and with reference to the oeuvres of Mia Couto and Abdulrazak Gurnah. Both are shown to muddle the inside-outside binary that delineates nations and continents, and which has been particularly stark in framing Africa in both imperial and nativist thought. At the same time, coastal form is found to decenter, extend, and thicken constructions of world literature, while opening to a planetary perspective sensible to the prodigious and implacable forces of the Anthropocene.

This article traces an epistolary exchange between South Africa and India that was animated by the circulation of print media and literary texts. The exchange – between the South African archivist, poet and social historian MK Jeffreys and the Indian statesmen and scholars VS Srinivasa Sastri and P Kodanda Rao – is read as forming part of a larger web of personal and political relations and textual traffic that contributed to the production of Indian Ocean public spheres. Through engagement with this particular case study, the article seeks to contribute to the scholarly turn from explorations of relations between ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ or along a North-South axis toward elaborating those engaging South-South connections within the Indian Ocean arena.

An intriguing epistolary exchange, criss-crossing the Indian Ocean and animated by the circulation of print media and literary texts, unfolded between South Africa and India from 1928 to 1946. The three figures engaged in this 'continuous correspondence' are Marie Kathleen Jeffreys (1896-1968), V. S. Srinivasa Sastri (1869-1946) and P. Kodanda Rao (c.1889-?). Jeffreys, a white South African, was employed at the Cape Town Archives; her interlocutors, Sastri and his personal secretary Rao, were based in South Africa from mid 1927 to early 1929 during Sastri's tenure as the first Agent of Colonial India. Materialised through a network of letters and the exchange of literature and print media, the relationship between the three knits together the geographically distinct domains of South Africa and India in striking ways. The geographical reach of this trans-oceanic exchange forms part of a larger web of relations and textual circulations increasingly drawing scholarly attention.

This article charts the tropes through which the Cape-as-port is rendered across five and a half centuries: Sea-Mountain, Cape of Storms and Cape of Good Hope. These tropes coalesce and draw apart in the monstrous manifestation of the promontory and its tempests that takes the shape of the epic figure of Adamastor. They are found to encode an ambivalent orientation between African and maritime, and Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds, and are suggestive of a formative worlding of the local literary scene from offshore. The article proceeds to propose that the intersecting portal comprising the Cape - at the seam of the world-system and the boundary of Africa - provides an entry point into current debates on world literature, and invites modes of reading that are simultaneously close and distant, local and global.

The rejoinder is that these civilisational indexes have been 'locked... up' in the 'gray vault' of the ocean where they lie shrouded beneath the shadow of the shark. [...]the sea is History'. [...]it nudges me towards an embrace of the condition of what Val Plumwood describes as 'being prey'. [...]the 'physical impossibility of death' for the human viewer is secured through the expendable nature of the shark. The uncanny nature of Hirst's 're-object' reverberates also in its production in his art 'factory' and in its trans-Atlantic passage to the New York Metropolitan Museum, which follows in reverse the final leg of the triangular trade along which the luxury goods produced by slave labour and procured with profits from the sale of persons were conveyed for metropolitan consumption.

Returning Recently to Teach at My Alma Mater, The University of Cape Town, I Was Amazed to Find That the Undergraduate curriculum to which I had been exposed at the dawn of the post-apartheid era remained substantially unaltered. With the exception of an experimentally convened introductory year that reverses chronology with interesting effects, the English major continues to plot a literary history across four inherited periods: Shakespeare and Co., Romance to Realism, Modernism, and Contemporary Literature, which collapses a previous bifurcation of the capstone course into Postmodernism or Postcolonialism.

Nudged into a new interpretive approach by a comment in her most recent novel, this essay presents an account of reading Wicomb's fiction that seeks to move beyond what Ricoeur describes as a \"hermeneutics of suspicion,\" and that responds to it rather as a gathering in which reader and text are mutually composed. Informed by Sedgwick's distinction between \"paranoid\" and \"reparative\" reading, Best and Marcus's \"surface reading\" and, particularly, Felski's \"postcritical\" and Barthes's earlier \"expressive\" reading, it follows Nuttall in locating questions of \"how we read now\" in a South African context that is framed by race. Drawing on Fanon and Latour, it thus charts how Wicomb's fiction dislodges race from a \"matter of fact\" by moving readers to respond to it instead as a \"matter of concern\" that, for all its fabrication, does things, and thus demands our care.

This article offers a close reading of the sea - as trope, archive, and living presence - in Wicomb's oeuvre. Charting the undercurrents of meaning rippling across Wicomb's texts, it finds in the sea an emblem of Wicomb's aesthetic and ethical concerns. The sea is shown to house an archive that challenges nationalist histories and unsettles their temporal divisions, throwing textual meaning and identities into flux. It summons readers to recognise the uncanny return of repressed narratives and to embark on trans-oceanic readings of local and land-bound narratives and histories.

The feature film Otelo Burning ( 2011 ) tells the story of black youth 'tasting freedom' by surfing waves in late apartheid South Africa and reflects on the emergence of a new national order by drawing Nelson Mandela's release from prison into its plot. This article situates the film in a genealogy of black-centred representations of Durban beach - including Peter Abrahams's memoir Tell Freedom (1954), Drum photographer Bob Gosani's framing of Dolly Rathebe at a Durban beach (1957), Lewis Nkosi's Mating Birds (1983) and the post-apartheid film Jerusalema ( 2008 ) - and in relation to international surfing fiction and film - particularly Kum Nunn's novel trilogy and the films Point Break ( 1991 ) and Blue Crush ( 2002 ). It focuses on the settings of beach and sea, township and pool and teases out the generic scripts that compose the film. A tension between the attraction of the outlaw figure that informs 'surf noir' and the production of the Bildungsheld as normative, 'responsibilitized' citizen-subject is found to animate this story of surfing and to direct the questions about freedom that it poses from the vantage point of a democracy itself now coming of age.