Positioned within the Research and Innovation Portfolio at Unisa, the Unisa Flame Series was sparked by the need to create a space in which to publish groundbreaking works of high merit and originality which move beyond the scope of the traditional.

Works that point to new expressive pathways, new ways of making sense, and new kinds of interactive accounts are published here. As original creative and analytical materials, books in the Series transcend the boundaries of subject field and medium, and are typically hard to package as either academic or popular. The aim of the Series is thus to open up a space at Unisa Press for such new forms of expression, which defy classical academic categories of publishing.

Within this paradigm of unlocking the future, which draws on Africa's scrambled periodisation in which premodernity, modernity and postmodernity cohabit, the Series draws in works that are cutting-edge and which cater for a new generation of digital natives as well as for an existing print-based readership.

This second book in the Unisa Flame Series, is a volume of poetry on the journey undertaken in the Jules Verne classic adventure novel, Around the World in Eighty Days – this The India Section. In a postmodernist pastiche mode, the highly versatile academic and poet, Ari Sitas, magically integrates Indian poetry forms, alludes to imagined places, weaves in sociological themes – and even employs a local Kerala artist to add exotic art works, as a double irony.

The volume consists of 32 poems, rounded off by 2 appendices and notes. Given the nature and scope of this text, images and music presented themselves as integral to the text. Sitas specifically guided Kerala-based artist Aami Atmaja to complete the sketches, which are interspersed between poems. Remarkable is the addition of a CD with original Indian music, composed and recorded for this book, with the cooperation of musicians Dean Henning, Mark van Niekerk, Sumangala Damodaran, Pritam Ghoshal, Pragya Taneja, Susmit Sen, Mark Aranha, Jurgen Brauninger and Sazi Dlamini, and performance poet Malika Ndlovu.

The theme of Verne's globe-circumventing adventure, a circular and strictly measured journey enters into the poetry as well as into recurring references and imagery of globes and various units of measurement.