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 chro- nology with interesting efects, 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. he distinction between postmodern and postcolonial litera- tures is—along with the categories themselves—perhaps best aban- doned. But what was shed along with it were works from most of the world. Nearly two decades into the new democracy, the major in what global rankings routinely present as South Africa’s leading de- partment of literary studies traced a bald arc from the early modern English stage to an all-American now. Distinct modules on South African and African literatures of- fered at the second-year level sit awkwardly to the side of this Euro- Atlantic chronology, and an inexplicable line is drawn between the national and the continental. hese modules were apparently intro- duced some years before I undertook my undergraduate studies. I understand them to be the product of a compromise that granted recognition to context on the condition that it not disturb the oth- erwise decontextualized thrust of English literature (the rationale for the separation of South African and African literatures remains opaque to me but indicates the ways in which knowledge is corralled in this country). It has since become compulsory for English majors to take one of these modules. Although this stipulation at least requires students to have read a handful of texts from the country and continent in which they are located, it has the taste of a vaguely beneicial but bitter sup- plementary pill: that implication is that it is good for them but not MEG SAMUELSON is an associate pro- fessor of English at the University of Cape Town. She is preparing two mono- graphs: South African Literatures: Nation, Sea, City (Oxford UP; Postcolonial Litera- tures) and Amphibian Aesthetics: Writing the Indian Ocean African Littoral. correspondents at large Literature in the World: A View from Cape Town meg samuelson [ PMLA © 2016 meg samuelson PMLA 131.5 (2016), published by the Modern Language Association of America 1544