Contaminations and Ethnographic Fictions

"The form that Oscar Hemer has created in Cape Calypso allows a multi-perspectival treatment of the subject-a great improvement on linear narrative."

-J.M. Coetzee, Professor of Literature, University of Adelaide, Australia, and recipient of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature

In an unusual merging of academic and literary practices, this volume attempts to identify a form (or forms) that is congenial with the subject of interrogation: the world in transition, with South Africa as the main focal point. Approaching anthropology from the position of the literary writer, Oscar Hemer here takes the reader through a kaleidoscope of perspectives-a stream-of-consciousness understanding of "writing the city" of Johannesburg, embedding ethnography in subjectivity; a challenge to binaries both temporal and gendered in examining the growth of the IT metropolis Bangalore to a combusting mega-city; an auto-ethnographic interweaving of fictional reportage with a close-reading of anthropological and philosophical treatises, including Mary Douglas's Purity and Danger and Edouard Glissant's Poetics of Relation, among others-to interrogate themes of transition, identity, purity and variation in the Western Cape. As the form transcends boundaries to create a methodological hybrid, creolization comes to the fore as a theoretical concept and as cultural practice.