Two years ago, we bid farewell and offered a vote of thanks to Andrew Offenburger, Safundi’s founding editor, from whose conviction (as a precocious College student endowed with prodigious foresight and enthusiasm) that there was a space, even a need, for a journal devoted to comparative study of South Africa and the United States, this journal grew – from a newsletter into a respected, peer-reviewed scholarly organ. Offenburger decided it was time to hand over the reins and embark on new scholarly endeavors.
Last year, Rita Barnard, who had served Safundi as one of two senior editors for a decade, decided it was time to devote herself to new pursuits. Professor Barnard, who has taught at the University of Pennsylvania for a quarter century, is both an important scholar of American modernism (her first monograph, The Great Depression and the Culture of Abundance: Kenneth Fearing, Nathanael West and Mass Culture in the 1930s, appeared in 1995) and perhaps the most eminent scholar of South African literature in the United States – and among the handful of most accomplished and most widely cited in the field internationally. Her second monograph, Apartheid and Beyond: South African Writers and the Politics of Place (2007), numerous contributions to leading edited collections, and many essays on South African fiction, drama, prose non-fiction, cultural studies, and literary historiography, in leading peer-reviewed journals and collections, are a staple of university courses on South Africa and South African writing throughout the world. Barnard’s recent edited collection, The Cambridge Companion to Nelson Mandela (2014), confirmed her reputation as among the most innovative and outward looking of humanities scholars, able to engage her fierce intelligence and her formidable collegiality to produce collaborative scholarship of outstanding quality and importance.
Barnard has been in an unequaled position to contribute to cross-disciplinary and transnational conversations involving scholars of contemporary writing and of modernism, of South African, and of American literatures and cultural studies – and this is precisely what she has done in her own work and, crucially for our purposes, in setting the course Safundi has taken in recent years. Quite simply, she has been the ideal senior editor: insightful, perspicacious, hard-nosed, encouraging, able to corral remarkable peer reviewers and to solicit extraordinary contributions from a range of scholars – including creative and “roundtable” responses that have come to be a staple of Safundi’s output, and among its most inventive and influential contributions to scholarship.
In academia, the adage goes, it is easier to be clever than to be kind: Rita has been both, for many people. Her generosity and her brilliance has been an inspiration to those of us who have been fortunate enough to work with her on this journal – and have inspired younger colleagues and doctoral students across the United States, Canada, South Africa, and the United Kingdom (among other places), now taking up positions in the academy, or making interesting lives for themselves outside of it. We are immensely grateful to Professor Barnard for her service to Safundi, and to the scholarly community that it serves.
During 2014, the editorial collective was expanded to include Alex Lichtenstein; this year, as Lichtenstein takes a sabbatical in order to act as editor for a leading journal of American History, we welcome Karin Shapiro, a historian of the American South and South Africa at Duke University, to the team. Next issue, as we add two new Reviews Editors (Monica Popescu, McGill, and Tiffany Willoughby-Herard, UC Irvine) and a new Associate Reviews Editor (Annel Pieterse, Western Cape), our line-up will be settled – we hope – for some time.
Karin Shapiro
Shane Graham
[email protected]
January 2016