South Africa and the global imagination THE LOCAL AND THE GLOBAL IN LITERARY AND CULTURAL STUDIES

This review essay considers two volumes published by Unisa Press in 2004 in the Imagined South Africa series of academic monographs, South Africa in the global imaginary (ed. Leonde Kock, Louise Bethlehem and Sonja Laden); and Michael Titlestad's Making the changes: jazz in South African literature and reportage. Both consider a range of shifting global articulations of South African identities, and local negotiations of variants of global discursive and expressive technologies. Offering its own assessments and contributions along the way, this essay considers the contributions made by the Global imaginary essays and by Titlestad's monograph in the context of postcolonial engagements with (and the rendering probematic of) the imagination as social practice. Both volumes, the essay suggests, make timely and engaging contributions to the study of South African cultural formations, and stake out the field for further research.