From ‘folklore’ to world literature : Reading indigenous responses to Place and belonging in the Bleek–Lloyd Archive of San Kukummi

The Bleek-Lloyd archive of San kukummi, traditionally read through the colonial lens of ‘folklore’, is now widely recognised by South African literary scholars as ‘a fragmentary, speculative yet vitally important means of reconstructing a wider Indigenous expressive culture that once existed throughout the subcontinent.’ (Twiddle, 2012). This chapter will begin by charting the history of the archive from a colonial enterprise which sought to extract, preserve and classify a culture thought to be ‘dying’ in the wake of displacement and genocide to its current position as a dynamic source of a distinctly South African storytelling tradition. I will reflect upon my own experiences teaching these kukummi as part of a first year undergraduate course called ‘Romantic Ecologies’ at the University of Kent, Canterbury, UK. I hope to provide reading strategies for navigating this unstable and copious colonial archive as well as pedagogical strategies for making San culture, cosmology and its survivance in contemporary South Africa visible and legible to literature students in the Euro-American academy.