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The article focuses on an interdisciplinary conference organised by the Kent Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities in April 2004. The title of the conference, Connecting Cultures attracted an extraordinarily diverse range of papers covering subjects from Caribbean narratives to translating India, to representing terrorism, and included papers on British Asian cinema and television, narrative and memory in South Africa, post-apartheid prose writing and culture contact in Border Zones. The paper of Terence Ranger, a speaker at the conference, considers a mode of translation as he explores the dynamics of the postcolonial interactions that exist in the system of Zimbabwe asylum appeals. He assesses the usefulness of examining asylum narratives both with the grain and against the grain to debate issues surrounding postcolonial assumptions both in Zimbabwe and in Britain. The papers that follow expand on various themes of the conference, commencing with a group of papers that discuss narrative and memory in South Africa and Zimbabwe.

One of the chief challenges facing post-apartheid writers has been the need to produce literature capable of working through the losses of the apartheid era. While the resistance struggle instrumentalised literary production and politicised funerals, the post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission provided a forum for the expression of personal loss but also tended to subsume individual testimonies within hegemonic national narratives. With particular reference to work by Zakes Mda, John Kani, JM Coetzee and Ingrid de Kok, this paper argues that postapartheid literature invents new forms of both mourning and community, offering alternative times and spaces for the expression of grief. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]