The book examines South African history and society from a variety of comparative perspectives. It brings together work by scholars based in South Africa, USA and the UK to reflect on the nature and evolution of what was considered for a long time a unique society. Drawing on studies of social, political and intellectual processes elsewhere, the authors seek to place South African developments in a broader context that sheds light on their specific features as well as global relevance.

Foreword - Preface - Acknowledgements - Notes on the Contributors - Identity, Race, History: South Africa and the Pan-African Context; R.Greenstein - Marxists or Fashionable Ladies? Gender, Identity and Working-Class History; I.Berger - Models and Metaphors: Industrial Education in the United States and South Africa; J.Campbell - End Games of Segregation and Apartheid: South Africa and the American South; J.W.Cell - The Role of Culture in Democracy Movements in the Black Expressive Tradition: Artist Performance Practice in Brazil, South Africa and the United States; R.M.Chandker - Black Power in the United States and Black Consciousness in South Africa: Connections and Comparisons; G.M.Fredrickson - Variations on Settler Ethnicity: The Dissolution of the Afrikaner Nationalist and Ulster Unionist Coalitions; A.Johnston - Oppositional Identities in Brazil and South Africa: Unions and the Transition to Democracy; G.W.Seidman - On the Mines: Work, Leisure and Resistance in the Folklore of Mines and Miners of South Africa and Appalachian America; R.Ralston - Afterword; J.Lonsdale - Index