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.
Benita Parry, Emerita Professor, University of Warwick
Johnson constructs a melancholic narrative of exploitation and subjugation which (as his present-day framing texts are used to prove) has merely taken on new disguises...Troubling this framing is the diversity of national, colonial and textual perspectives employed in Johnson’s both interesting and contestable construction of the imaginings of the region.
- Annie Gagiano, University of Stellenbosch, Journal of Postcolonial Writing
Written in an admirably clear and succinct style, Imagining the Cape Colony is an important book, with which every scholar of South Africa’s history and literature should engage. It opens up many new avenues for research, while providing a sober reminder of the vast amount of work that still needs to be done to truly transform South Africa, and of the disturbing ways in which history can be perverted.
- Gerald Groenewald, University of Johannesburg, Journal of Southern African Studies, 40:4
This is an outstandingly insightful and innovative study. David Johnson singlehandedly opens up new research terrains by challenging current orthodoxies about literary and historical representation and he brings the early Cape Colony into the centre of contemporary debates about identity, power and the pervasive presence of inequality in post-apartheid South Africa.
Nigel Worden, King George V Professor of History, University of Cape Town
Imagining the Cape Colony sustains a clear argument without overstating its case, and its selective focus highlights moments of Cape history with authentic reverberations in the present. We seem always to be looking to the future for where we want to be, but perhaps, David Johnson suggests, we should look in our past and in our imaginations. Our history offers many examples of flexible, tolerant and just community, which we can learn from, even on the national scale. 2014 is the twentieth anniversary of South African non-racial nationhood, and we have much to celebrate, including this rich and generous book, which nonetheless offers a critique of any triumphalism or complacency in the rhetoric of the currently ruling party.
- Tony Voss, Transformation
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.
- Benita Parry, Emerita Professor, University of Warwick,
This is an outstandingly insightful and innovative study. David Johnson single-handedly opens up new research terrains by challenging current orthodoxies about literary and historical representation and he brings the early Cape Colony into the centre of contemporary debates about identity, power and the pervasive presence of inequality in post-apartheid South Africa.
- Nigel Worden, King George V Professor of History, University of Cape Town,