Cultural solidarities: itineraries of anti-apartheid expressive culture—introduction to the special issue

Continuing the investigation of networked cultural responses in the Global South construed as “cultural solidarities” that was embarked upon in the first special issue of this two-part series, “Cultural Solidarities: Apartheid and the anti-colonial commons of world literature,” Safundi Vol. 19, no.3, the introduction to this, its second volume, investigates how the cultural imagination animates transnational solidarities across a variety of media, and against the backdrop of the Cold War. Taking the interplay between the local and the global in apartheid South Africa of the 1950s and 1960s as its point of departure, this special issue is particularly attuned to diasporic or exilic arenas of South African cultural production. As they consider figures including Mary Benson, Johnny Dyani, Mongezi Feza, Chris McGregor, Louis Moholo-Moholo, Dudu Pukwana, Oliver Tambo, and Trevor Huddleston, our contributors, Louise Bethlehem, Lindelwa Dalamba, and Tal Zalmanovich, draw attention to the imbrication of local histories with global movements engendered by the itineracy of these figures. Transnationalism figures differently in two additional contributions. Sarika Talve-Goodman explores the carceral imaginary of Alan Paton’s writing to sketch out intersections between racialized carceral state-building in South Africa and the United Sates, while Gautam Chakrabarti’s reflections on the Soviet-Indian axis in the formation of “committed” networks of theater practitioners in India lends additional impetus to the interrogation of the conditions of possibility underlying the establishment of long-distance solidarity that was broached in the previous special issue in this series.