In an unusual merging of academic and literary practices, this volume attempts to identify a form (or forms) that is congenial with the subject of interrogation: the world in transition, with South Africa as the main focal point.

"The form that Oscar Hemer has created in Cape Calypso allows a multi-perspectival treatment of the subject—a great improvement on linear narrative." —J.M. Coetzee, Professor of Literature, University of Adelaide, Australia, and recipient of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature In an unusual merging of academic and literary practices, this volume attempts to identify a form (or forms) that is congenial with the subject of interrogation: the world in transition, with South Africa as the main focal point. Approaching anthropology from the position of the literary writer, Oscar Hemer here takes the reader through a kaleidoscope of  perspectives—a stream-of-consciousness understanding of “writing the city” of Johannesburg, embedding ethnography in subjectivity; a challenge to binaries both temporal and gendered in examining the growth of the IT metropolis Bangalore to a combusting mega-city; an auto-ethnographic interweaving of fictional reportage with a close-reading of anthropological and philosophical treatises, including Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger and Edouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation, among others—to interrogate themes of transition, identity, purity and variation in the Western Cape. As the form transcends boundaries to create a methodological hybrid, creolization comes to the fore as a theoretical concept and as cultural practice.

A profound literary examination of the anthropology of identity Probes various kinds of boundaries in a kaleidoscopic text, examining intersections of identity both cultural/collective and personal/subjective A complex examination of question of race, racialization, and creolization in South Africa and the world at large