Period photograph by Arthur Elliot, of Cape vernacular architecture

Biography

MA (1990) and PhD (2002), University of Cape Town (literary-historical studies).
Lecturer to honorary professor, Humanities, University of the Western Cape.

Research interests

• Habitat, heritage, environment and cultural landscape – reconstructing debates about a public imaginary, identity formation, material and written culture, in modern South Africa from circa 1890 – with particular emphasis on the making of a symbolic order for the Union of South Africa in 1910.
• Literature and rhetoric.
• The symbolic order, the public imaginary, and abjection (a Kristevan approach to the reading of public cultural discourse in Southern Africa).
• The Carnegie reports on poverty in South Africa.

Sample of publications

“‘Nothing New Under the Sun’ – anatomy of a literary-historical polemic in colonial Cape Town circa 1880-1910”, in Written Culture in a Colonial Context: Africa and the Americas, 1500-1900, ed. by Adrien Delmas and Nigel Penn. UCT Press, Cape Town, 2011: 189-206.

'The State', produced by Lionel Curtis and Phillip Kerr of the Commonwealth Round Table (1908-1912) to promote the concept of the Union of South Africa

‘Loyal Memory: the Tercentenary in Colonial Cape Town’, article on the 1916 Shakespeare tercentenary. Shakespearean International Yearbook, 9, 2009: 29-45.

‘Lawrence, the Jutas, and the “Mediterranean” Cape’, in DH Lawrence around the World: South African Perspectives, ed. by Jim Phelps and Nigel Bell.  Echoing Green, Empangeni, 2007: 248-66.

‘Cape Dutch Tongaat: A Case Study in Heritage’. Journal of Southern African Studies 32, 4, 2006: 683-98.

A poster advertising the 1910 Pageant of the Union of South Africa

‘C. Louis Leipoldt’s “Valley Trilogy” and Contested Nationalisms in South Africa, circa 1920-1930’. Current Writing, 15, 2003: 32-48.

‘Staging History, Inventing Heritage: the ‘New Pageantry’ and British Imperial Identity, 1905-1935’, in Archaeologies of the British, ed. by Susan Lawrence. Routledge, London, 2003:  239-58.

‘A Staggered Orientalism: The Cape-to-Cairo Imaginary’. Poetics Today 22, 2, 2001: special issue on ‘SA in the Global Imaginary’  (This issue of Poetics Today was awarded the best Special Issue by the Modern Languages Association of America for 2002, and has been reissued in book form).

‘State of the Union: Performance and Public Identity in North America and South Africa, 1908-1910’. Journal of Literary Studies, 15, 1-2, 1999: 238-63 (won the Thomas Pringle Prize for 2000).

Two books of fiction: Zebra Crossings, tales from the shaman’s record (2002) and The Zombie and the Moon, more tales from the shaman’s record (2011) with Jacana Media, Johannesburg and Cape Town.

Book in progress: First Light, False Dawn: The 1910 Union of South Africa and early discourses on public heritage.

See also Peter's Academia web page