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The article describes the multiple discursive and actual connections between ideas of a 'Black Aesthetic' in both the South African and the US-American contexts during the mid twentieth century. It is centred on knowledge produced between 1965 and 1985, when the Black Power/Black Arts and Black Consciousness movements gained prominence among urban intellectuals. Specific debates and argumentations that focused on black and African aesthetics and the respective groups of actors involved are depicted. The article follows the development of the discussions to the early 1990s, to conclude on actual similarities and differences and the factors that arguably produce them. Throughout, the study follows an actor-centred approach and ultimately counters the broad narrative of a 'United States–South Africa' connection that is circulating in academic and public spheres and questions more generally the focus on geographical locations to understand Black and African ideologies and their entanglements. By doing this, the article wants to contribute to the question how we can approach engaged or radical views of black and African aesthetics comparatively and the presence of those legacies today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article follows the fortunes of a group of riveters who moved, briefly, from the Clyde to the Copperbelt to work on construction at the newly opened copper mines in the region in 1930. Escaping from Depression-era Glasgow, these volatile riveters clashed with hard-bitten American mine managers over wages, self-respect and the colour bar in southern Africa, events best understood within a framework of the transnational world of white labour. The history of labour migration in colonial Africa has been studied almost exclusively in terms of African labour yet large numbers of people arrived from outside the continent to work on the mines in central and southern Africa. Although only a sliver of these wider population flows, the riveters provide a snapshot in the wider British labour movement and movements of white migrants during this period. This article argues that their experiences illustrate the curious, influential politics of 'white labourism' where political radicalism and industrial militancy were intricately linked to white domination and racial segregation. Drawing on records from the mining companies, it will be demonstrated that these men saw themselves as militant representatives of an international working class, but one strictly delineated on racial lines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reviews the recent upsurge of writing on the history of the early colonial Cape Colony from the VOC period to the early nineteenth century. It responds to important questions raised by Nicole Ulrich's review article of Contingent Lives in this issue. In particular it considers what is gained and what can be lost in the recent shift from class-based analyses characteristic of late twentieth-century revisionist South African historiography to research more influenced by the 'cultural turn', transnational and microhistorical approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1843 William Sammons founded the peculiarly named Sam Sly's African Journal (1843-1851) in Cape Town. Claiming to be a 'register of facts, fiction, news, literature, commerce and amusement', the African Journal was a hybrid newspaper and literary and satirical periodical aimed at an Anglophone immigrant readership. Studies of the press have emphasised its role as a discursive agent in forming imagined communities of identity, but this has tended to focus on isolating nations or localities rather than noting the global context. However, recent scholarship on the British Empire has moved beyond nationally focused histories towards examining metropole and colony within the same mutually constitutive frame. This article draws on the conception of the circulation of newspapers as a significant means for negotiating geographies of identity in the empire, but seeks to broaden the focus beyond networks of competing official, humanitarian and settler discourses. This involves examining the materiality of the colonial press - its local and global circulation and readership, and the nature of its diverse content ranging from imaginative literature, to letters and editorials - to shed light on how the African Journal's readers negotiated their identity, cultural attachment and respectability as colonists of British descent poised on the empire's periphery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]