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The South Africa Reader: History, Culture, Politics ed. by Clifton Crais and Thomas V. McClendon (review)

enterprise but Desai never lets him occlude the “minor”—I do not use the word pejoratively here—histories his book excavates. Desai focuses on lesser-known texts from a vast array of interdisciplinary resources in order to give us a fuller picture of Asians in Africa and also how they “resonate with . . . Ghosh’s Indian Ocean tale” (13). While these chapters are rich with historical and political context, the section on “Asian African Literatures: Genealogies in the Making” is by far the most interesting (75), especially the way it sets up the closer readings that follow in the next chapters, which examine Asian nonfiction and fiction about East Africa. In chapter 4, “Through Indian Eyes: Travel and the Performance of Ethnicity,” Desai studies two Indians who went to East Africa in the first part of the 20th century: Ebrahimji Adamji and Sorabji Darookhanawala. This chapter is followed by another section on three autobiographies about Asian life in East Africa. The last chapter is an exploration of writings by three Asians who were asked by President Nyerere to help create the new nation of Tanganiyika (152). The chapter thus shows how Asians in East Africa were active participants in the project of nationconstruction the way they were, as is more generally known, in South Africa. The last chapter analyzes Vassanji’s The Gunny Sack, which Desai views as encapsulating the rich history of Asian identity in East Africa. The book ends with a coda that adumbrates its intervention—to show how Asians in Africa have attempted to engage in a cultural politics “beyond that of the color line” (215), a project that Desai executes admirably well. This is an excellent book, which can only be described in superlatives. It is path-breaking, rigorously researched, and elegantly written. Desai demonstrates an encyclopedic knowledge about the Asian cultures of Africa and is able to bring together major literary figures and marginal writers with remarkable skill.