Course entry requirements: Acceptance for an honours programme.

This twelve-week seminar course is organised around the theme of mobility amongst black South African women during the inter-war period (1918-1939). While the conventional historiography is dominated by accounts of travels and international networks of men, this course suggests an alternative by examining the historical contexts, the intellectual milieux, the experiential narratives, and the social and literary effects of the journeys of black South African women abroad. Exploring the conceptual differences between internationalism and transnationalism, this course historicises gendered mobility and analyses the shifting intersectionalities of race, class, gender and location. Students are not only exposed to a broad range of primary documents (such as essays, poems, speeches, letters and newspaper articles) produced by and about these women, but also equipped to reflect critically on the nature of the concerned archive and its politics of erasure and marginalisation.