History Compass 11/7 (2013): 508–512, 10.1111/hic3.12059 South Africa’s Indian Ocean – Notes from Johannesburg Isabel Hofmeyr * University of the Witwatersrand Abstract This article reviews the emerging intersections between southern African studies and Indian Ocean studies and the broader contexts enabling this dialogue. South Africa’s political transition in 1994 encouraged an interest in South African histories that moved beyond an anti-apartheid historiography of Black and White, while post-Cold War imperatives and the rise of transnationalism have directed attention towards post-area studies and oceanic modes of analysis that can speak to the histories of the global south. The article surveys new work emerging at these intersections. This includes research, which inserts Indian Ocean migrant communities into older historiographies dominated by narratives of African and European; literary scholarship, which rethinks southern African literary traditions by introducing the ocean more prominently; work on transnational Muslim traditions in southern Africa; ideas of transoceanic citizenship and scholarship on southern Africans who travel into the Indian Ocean world. While Indian Ocean studies have continued to gain momentum over the past few decades, southern Africa as an analytical region stands in an uneasy relationship to this scholarship. Located below the monsoon-belt, southern African seldom features in the canonical genealogies of Indian Ocean scholarship focused on the monsoon-driven early modern transoceanic trading system of the western Indian Ocean domain. 1 The Swahili world of the East African littoral by comparison figures more prominently in Indian Ocean scholarship (although overall Africa’s presence is dwarfed by that of South Asia). 2 When one turns from the early modern period to the age of European empires, southern Africa enters the picture more prominently: slaves, indentured labourers, convicts and political exiles from across the Indian Ocean world arrived as forced migrants, while merchants and settlers moved on a voluntary basis. 3 We hence know a lot about southern Africa as a receiver of Indian Ocean migration. We know less about what these in-migrations meant for the places from which people had come. There is also little awareness of southern Africans who have travelled out into the Indian Ocean. Yet, despite these uneasy alignments (or non-alignments), over the last decade Indian Ocean studies has been gaining momentum in South Africa. An important analytical arena for making sense of the emerging global south, Indian Ocean studies offers suggestive directions for those grappling with how to write transnational histories that can speak to an era in which post-apartheid, post-Cold War imperatives meet the exigencies of ‘the Asian century’. These notes from Johannesburg describe Indian Ocean projects that have taken shape in the South African academy whilst reflecting on what these might mean for the mainstream historiographies of the Indian Ocean as well as canonical traditions of southern African studies. 4 The South African academy has long sustained a small but distinguished tradition of scholarship on slavery at the Cape and indentured labour in Natal, both groups that originated in the Indian Ocean world. 5 During the anti-apartheid years, these traditions remained somewhat marginal to the major historiography, which focused on the struggle © 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd