I've been Professor of English since 1984 at what was then the University of Natal, its change of name consequent upon a merger process in South African tertiary education.

I was born in Durban and grew up in the mining town of Kimberley, a rich literary as well as diamond field in the late 19th century. After studying the canonical Chaucer to TS Eliot syllabus at the University of London, I turned to South African, African, and now postcolonial, world and comparative literatures.

As an A-rated researcher (National Research Foundation), a research fellow of the University of Kwazulu-Natal and the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (www.stias.ac.za ), author of numerous books and articles, and editor of several anthologies in the literatures primarily of southern Africa, I hope on this site to introduce you to what is, I think, a challenging area of study.

A major question for us, here, has been and continues to be how to talk about art in a politically demanding society.

It is a question central to both my literary history Southern African Literatures (1996; 2003) and my collection of essays Art Talk, Politics Talk (2006). [See Achievements] It lends coherence also to two recently completed projects, the first published as Postcolonialism: South/African Perspectives (2008), the second forming the contents of a special 21st-anniversary issue of the journal Current Writing, titled 'Beyond 2000: South African Literature Today' (2009). [See Books]