Lament and Song provides the groundwork for the study of History is the Home Address.
This is precisely because History is the Home Address does not only engage with the
past, but also significantly illuminates the present while contemplating the future in the
wake of the collapse of apartheid and the confrontation with globalization together with
the migratory drift it engenders.
In Anticipation of Tomorrow: Globalization and ‘Transnation’ in Serote’s History is
the Home Address
The remaining part of this chapter will focus on Serote’s History is the Home Address. It
will locate the text within the discourse of “transnation”, a concept the chapter explores
below. The central argument will be that even in a national dispensation of post-apartheid
transformation, which has brought about a massive return of people to the country, South
Africa’s present configuration is also ramified within the contemporary planetary order of
globalization. For this reason, I will argue further that despite the pervasive nationalist
rootedness that characterizes the previous text, Serote reconciles the contradiction that
may emerge in the juxtaposition of both texts by maintaining a balance between the
pragmatism of a nationalist rootedness, and the simultaneous inevitability of experiences
of deterritorialization in the age of globalization.
Perhaps, the need to maintain a delicate balance between a space-based nationalism and a
flexible type which is amenable at the same time to the dictates of postmodern times of
migrancy informs the need to reckon that both Freedom Lament and Song and History is
the Home Address complement, rather than contradict each other. It can be said that the
former comes across as an immediate response to the phenomenal transformation from
institutional apartheid to a non-segregatory democracy in the early 1990s. However, the
latter takes into account the complexities that arise from the challenge of managing a
nation that has come to be identified as the newest arrival to the class of the postcolonial
state (Jean Comaroff 2005: 129). Comaroff intimates further that one telling trope of the
postcolonial state as a class or category is the systematic manifestation of “polities in