Imagining the Cape Colony

David Johnson is Professor of Literature in the Department of English and Creative Writing at The Open University. He is the author of Shakespeare and South Africa (1996), Imagining the Cape Colony: History, Literature and the South African Nation (2012) and Dreaming of Freedom in South Africa: Literature between Critique and Utopia (2019); and the co-editor of A Historical Companion to Postcolonial Literatures in English (2008); The Book in Africa: Critical Debates (2015); and Labour Struggles in Southern Africa (2023). He is the General Editor of the Edinburgh University Press series Key Texts in Anti-Colonial Thought.

• Acknowledgements; Introduction; 1. Remembering the Khoikhoi victory over Dom Francisco d'Almeida at the Cape in 1510: Luiz de Camões and Robert Southey; 2. French Representations of the Cape 'Hottentots': Jean Tavernier, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and François Levaillant; 3. The Scottish Enlightenment and colonial governance: Adam Smith, John Bruce, and Lady Anne Barnard; 4. African Land for the American Empire: John Adams, Benjamin Stout, and Robert Semple; 5. Historical and literary re-iterations of Dutch Settler Republicanism; 6. Literature and Cape Slavery; 7. History and the Griqua Nation: Andries Waterboer and Hendrick Hendricks; Conclusion; Index.

The excitement of reading this book is in its delivering more than the title indicates. Grounded in meticulous historical research, Johnson’s work engages with contemporary debates about the nation, offering the innovative argument that colonial forms of nationhood and nationalism, resisted/subverted/even ignored normative concepts developed in the northern hemisphere.