So begins chapter one of Jacob Dlamini's first book, Native Nostalgia (2009), an attempt ‘to understand the question of what it means for a black South African to remember his life under apartheid with fondness’ (2). The passage suggests the intersection of the personal and the political, or even the geopolitical, which characterises his writing: it is an oeuvre that often seems more interested in the relation between the local and the global than in remaining within an increasingly vexed and limiting national imaginary – a comparative ambition that I will be tracing throughout this chapter. The paragraph also suggests the playful, insouciant tone that Dlamini brings to this portrait of his upbringing in Katlehong, even as he navigates the pitfalls of such unstable terrain.

This autobiographical, personable beginning, however, is not allowed to stand for itself. It is pre-empted by an introduction in a far more analytic and often anxious register, one that turns to social and political theory to gird itself and to justify the intimate and vulnerable memory work that follows. Native Nostalgia is in this sense a book formed from a double helix of personal narrative and generalised analysis: a mixture of implicit and explicit ways of telling that make it an unusual and shape-shifting piece of writing.