This special issue of PARSE Journal is the result of a collaborative project, with “conviviality” and “contamination” as inspirational but not delimiting concepts. It has been carried out by an international group of twelve artists and academics, writers and researchers, who came together in the autumn of 2022 to generate the body of work presented in the volume.

The project began with transversal forms of writing as its main focus, with the original cohort of contributors all active at the interface of literary and academic writing. However, as the process developed and more participants were drawn into the project, sound emerged as a secondary focus and an alternative angle from which to approach the themes of conviviality and contamination. Overall, the contributions perhaps represent the contributors' own “hot compost pile” of voices, art forms and perspectives.

More than a quarter of a century since Nelson Mandela became the country’s first democratically elected president, the racial categories of apartheid live on in South Africa. The proud vision of the “Rainbow Nation” is now being challenged by various forms of populism, with racial thinking as the common denominator. How can one advocate for non-racism and cosmopolitanism—in South Africa and the world—without being perceived as a defender of the privileges of the white minority? Oscar Hemer, Professor of the Arts at Malmö University, considers these questions in discussion with South African author colleagues Masande Ntshanga, Ivan Vladislavić and Bronwyn Law-Viljoen.

On his fourteenth journey to South Africa, Oscar Hemer repeatedly comes across the casual expression “going to the dogs” and starts reflecting on dogs and other companion species with regards to his ongoing exploration of “speculative anthropology”. When does something go to the dogs? Is there a correlation between contaminated diversity and decline? Even though contamination may appear to be a hopeless motto for political mobilisation at present, he arrives at the conclusion that it is the only option for a country—and a planet—increasingly pressured by essentialisms of multiple varieties that all counteract the fine balance of everyday conviviality.

The chronological travel account from March 2022 is juxtaposed with a parallel text, written before and after (October in Berlin), which from a slightly altered perspective reflects on the process and the form of the “Conviviality and Contamination” project.

Strax före jul får syskonen Beyonce och Lasse ett överraskande sms: ”Nu har pappa och jag bestämt att vi reser bort några veckor. Ni är välkomna att bo i Sandäng medan vi är borta. Det finns mat i kylen. Puss. Mamma”.

Åtta månader senare är Leo och Tania fortfarande spårlöst försvunna. Men alla löpande räkningar betalas per autogiro, till och med ICA-kortet fylls på automatiskt varje månad. Lasse är kvar i huset på Österlen efter att ha svultit sig genom en snövinter som lokalt skördade fler liv än pandemin. Beyonce, hans räddare i nöden, kommer nu tillbaka från Christiania och flyttar in med sin katt i föräldrarnas sovrum. 

Familj är en roman om den i grunden slumpmässiga fusion av två individers gener, förhoppningar och minnen som i sin tur är produkter av slumpmässiga kombinationer av ärvda och förvärvade egenskaper och erfarenheter i två eller tre led – så länge det levande minnet varar. Ramhandlingen utspelar sig pandemiåret 2020 på Österlen, men berättelsen sträcker sig över tre generationer och tre kontinenter till bland annat sjuttiotalets Tanzania och den finska krigsvintern 1939-40.

Anthropology’s interest in fiction as method, and as ethnographic data, can be traced

to the literary turn in the 1980s, although the close relation between anthropology

and literature goes back to some of the early anthropologists who were also excellent

authors.The new orientation, sparked by James Clifford and George Marcus’s seminal

anthology Writing Culture, essentially entailed the unsettling of the former balance, in

classical ethnography, between the “ethnographic self” and the “personal self,” enabling

a plurivocality in ethnography that resembles the shifting subject positions of a novel.

From its original focus on the writing process and as an approach to literary methods

and formats, literary anthropology has grown and diversified to also encompass

the reading of literary texts, including fiction. A parallel tradition in visual anthropology

includes the cross-genre ethnofiction (Jean Rouch) and the use of fictional staging

as a method. Although blurred, the border between fiction and ethnography remains

asserted.

JORGE LUIS BORGES (1899–1986) är en av nittonhundratalets mest ikoniska förfat­tare. Hans berömmelse vilar både på den ny skapande litteratur han producerade under mer än ett halvt sekel och på mytologin kring hans liv: han var den unga avantgardisten, den utvalde huvudbibliotekarien vid nationalbib­lioteket i Buenos Aires, den stridbare Peron­-motståndaren som gjorde mer än ett politiskt snedsteg och, på ålderns höst, den blinde bar­den som fostrade en ny generation författare.

I nio essäer djupdyker Borgeskännaren Oscar Hemer i Borges liv och författarskap utifrån lika många perspektiv, till exempel kärle­ken till hemstaden Buenos Aires, de ideliga förälskelserna, fascinationen för den judiska mystiken och förhållandet till Sverige och Nobelpriset.

Idén till boken föddes under arbetet med de tre stora volymer med Jorge Luis Borges verk som Tranan givit ut under de senaste åren. Oscar Hemer — som varit en av redaktörerna och översättarna — började skriva en bok som kan ackompanjera läsningen av Borges egna texter, skriven i en på samma gång lärd och personlig stil.Boken kan ses som en pendang till de tre Borges-volymerna och fungerar både som fördjupning och läsguide, samtidigt som essäerna också är lättillgängliga och allmänbildande för den vanliga läsaren.

This chapter discusses three concepts—cosmopolitanism, conviviality and creolisation—that, although emanating from diverse historical and academic contexts, are clearly interrelated and, arguably, interdependent. Ivan Illich (Tools for Conviviality, New York: Perennial Library, 1973) envisioned a post-industrial convivial society of “autonomous individuals and primary groups” which resembles present-day manifestations of ‘convivialism’. Paul Gilroy (After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? London: Routledge, 2004) refashioned conviviality as a substitute for cosmopolitanism, denoting an ability to be ‘at ease’ in contexts of diversity. Rather than replacing one concept with the other, this chapter explores the interconnections between them. The urgency of today’s global predicament is a recurring reason to bring them in dialogue. From the perspective of Communication for Development, the as yet little explored axis between conviviality and creolisation is potentially the most interesting one.

This book is an experimental interrogation in the crossroads of literature and anthropology (fiction and ethnography). “Southern Crossings” refers to travels in the Global South, i. e. India and, primarily, South Africa, whereas “contaminations” invokes a supposed tradition of genre transgression and cross-over writing. The form aims at being congenial with the subject: an exploration of purity vs. impurity, or racialisation vs. creolisation, and a reflection on identity and boundaries, personal and collective. Close readings of Mary Douglas (Purity and Danger), Edouard Glissant (Poetics of Relation) and others (Appadurai, Coetzee, Zimitri Erasmus) are interfoliated with a fictional autoethnography in third person (and third gender), spanning from 2007 to 2018. Many anthropologists have tried literary or journalistic forms of expression, but this book is an unusual, if not unique, approach to anthropology from the literary writer’s position. It ambitiously competes on both literary and academic merits.

With the 2015 refugee migration and its aftermath as a main reference and focal point, this anthology uses Conviviality as a lens to examine the current challenges to democracy. Conviviality and the inter-related concepts Cosmopolitanism and Creolisation are assumed to provide tools for analysis as well as forms for “cross-cutting communication”. Originally introduced by Ivan Illich (1973), conviviality was re-launched and re-defined by Paul Gilroy (2004) against a backdrop of social, racial and religious tensions in post-imperial Britain, denoting an ability to be at ease in the presence of diversity without restaging communitarian conceptions of ethnic and racial difference, and has subsequently been refined to provide “an analytical tool to ask and explore in what ways, and under what conditions, people constructively create modes of togetherness” (Nowicka & Vertovec 2014: 2). In Gilroy’s understanding conviviality was a substitute for cosmopolitanism, which in his view had been hijacked as a pretext for Western “supposedly benign imperialism” in the aftermath of 9/11 and the war on terror (Gilroy 2004: 66). But rather than replacing one concept with the other, this anthology seeks to explore the interconnections – commonalities and differences – between cosmopolitanism and conviviality. Creolisation is the other supplementary concept, by constituting a valid alternative to conventional interpretations of cross-cultural contact and allowing agency and influence to hitherto marginal and subordinate cultures and peoples (Cohen and Toninato 2010).