Rendering the Cape-as-port: Sea-Mountain, Cape of Storms/Good Hope, Adamastor and local-world literary formations

Abstract

This article charts the tropes through which the Cape-as-port is rendered across five and a half centuries: Sea-Mountain, Cape of Storms and Cape of Good Hope. These tropes coalesce and draw apart in the monstrous manifestation of the promontory and its tempests that takes the shape of the epic figure of Adamastor. They are found to encode an ambivalent orientation between African and maritime, and Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds, and are suggestive of a formative worlding of the local literary scene from offshore. The article proceeds to propose that the intersecting portal comprising the Cape – at the seam of the world-system and the boundary of Africa – provides an entry point into current debates on world literature, and invites modes of reading that are simultaneously close and distant, local and global.