Print, Text and Book Cultures in South Africa

PRINT, TEXT AND
BOOK CULTURES
IN SOUTH AFRICA
EDITED BY Andrew van der Vlies
PRINT, TEXT AND
BOOK CULTURES
IN SOUTH AFRICA
PRINT, TEXT AND
BOOK CULTURES
IN SOUTH AFRICA
EDITED BY Andrew van der Vlies
Published in South Africa by:
Wits University Press

1 Jan Smuts Avenue
Johannesburg
www.witspress.co.za
Published edition © Wits University Press 2012

Compilation © Edition editor 2012
Chapters © Individual contributors 2012
First published 2012
ISBN 978-1-86814-566-9 (Print)

ISBN 978-1-86814-593-5 (Epub)
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means,
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the written permission of the publisher, except in accordance with the
provisions of the Copyright Act, Act 98 of 1978.
Cover images: Death of a Typewriter and Abamfusa Lawu

by Willem Boshoff
Edited by Alex Potter

Cover design and layout by Hothouse South Africa
Printed and bound by Creda Communications
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements viii
Abbreviations and acronyms xi
1. INTRODUCTORY 1
1.1 Print, Text and Books in South Africa 2
ANDREW VAN DER VLIES
2. PRINT CULTURES AND COLONIAL PUBLIC SPHERES 49

2.1 Metonymies of Lead: Bullets, Type and Print 50
Culture in South African Missionary Colonialism
LEON DE KOCK
2.2 “Spread Far and Wide over the Surface of 74

the Earth”: Evangelical Reading Formations and
the Rise of a Transnational Public Sphere: The Case of the
Cape Town Ladies’ Bible Association
ISABEL HOFMEYR
2.3 Textual Circuits and Intimate Relations: A Community 87

of Letters across the Indian Ocean
MEG SAMUELSON
3. LOCAL/GLOBAL: SOUTH AFRICAN WRITING 109

AND GLOBAL IMAGINARIES
3.1 Deneys Reitz and Imperial Co-option 110
JOHN GOUWS
3.2 “Consequential Changes”: Daphne Rooke’s Mittee in 121

America and South Africa
LUCY VALERIE GRAHAM
3.3 Oprah’s Paton, or South Africa and the Globalisation 140

of Suffering
RITA BARNARD
PRINT, TEXT AND BOOK CULTURES IN SOUTH AFRICA
4. THREE WAYS OF LOOKING AT COETZEE 165

4.1 In (or From) the Heart of the Country: Local and Global 166
Lives of Coetzee’s Anti-pastoral
4.2 Under Local Eyes: The South African Publishing 195

Context of J. M. Coetzee’s Foe
JARAD ZIMBLER
4.3 Limber: The Flexibilities of Post-Nobel Coetzee 208

PATRICK DENMAN FLANERY
5. QUESTIONS OF THE ARCHIVE AND THE USES OF BOOKS 225

5.1 Colin Rae’s Malaboch: The Power of the Book in the 226
(Mis)Representation of Kgaluši Sekete Mmalebôhô
LIZE KRIEL
5.2 “Send Your Books on Active Service”: The Books for Troops 240
Scheme during the Second World War, 1939–1945
ARCHIE L. DICK
5.3 From The Origin of Language to a Language of Origin: 252

A Prologue to the Grey Collection
HEDLEY TWIDLE
6. ORATURE, IMAGE, TEXT 285

6.1 The Image of the Book in Xhosa Oral Poetry 286
JEFF OPLAND
6.2 Written Out, Writing In: Orature in the South African 306
Literary Canon
DEBORAH SEDDON
6.3 Not Western: Race, Reading and the South African 325
Photocomic
LILY SAINT
vi
Contents
7. IDEOLOGICAL EXIGENCIES AND THE FATES OF BOOKS 347

7.1 The Politics of Obscenity: Lady Chatterley’s Lover and 348
the Apartheid State
PETER D. McDONALD
7.2 “Deeply Racist, Superior and Patronising”: South African 369

Literature Education and the “Gordimer Incident”
MARGRIET VAN DER WAAL
7.3 Begging the Questions: Producing Shakespeare for 386

Post-apartheid South African Schools
NATASHA DISTILLER
8. NEW DIRECTIONS 407

8.1 The Rise of the Surface: Emerging Questions for Reading 408
and Criticism in South Africa
SARAH NUTTALL
8.2 Sailing a Smaller Ship: Publishing Art Books in South Africa 422
BRONWYN LAW-VILJOEN
8.3 The University as Publisher: Towards a History of 437

South African University Presses
ELIZABETH LE ROUX
Contributors 449
Index 454

vii
Acknowledgements
The following chapters are reproduced with permission:

Chapters 2.2, “‘Spread Far and Wide over the Surface of the Earth’:
Evangelical Reading Formations and the Rise of a Transnational Public Sphere:
The Case of the Cape Town Ladies’ Bible Association” by Isabel Hofmeyr;
3.3, “Oprah’s Paton, or South Africa and the Globalisation of Suffering” by
Rita Barnard; 4.2, “Under Local Eyes: The South African Publishing Context
of J. M. Coetzee’s Foe” by Jarad Zimbler; and 7.1, “The Politics of Obscenity:
Lady Chatterley’s Lover and the Apartheid State” by Peter D. McDonald all
first appeared in English Studies in Africa 47(1) (2004). Barnard’s, Zimbler’s
and McDonald’s chapters have been revised by the authors for the present
collection. All appear here by kind permission of English Studies in Africa and
its editor, Michael Titlestad; Unisa Press; and Taylor & Francis South Africa.
Chapter 2.3, “Textual Circuits and Intimate Relations: A Community of
Letters across the Indian Ocean” by Meg Samuelson, is a substantial revision
of an essay that was first published as “A Community of Letters on the Indian
Ocean Rim: Friendship, Fraternity and (Af-filial) Love” in English in Africa
31(5) (2008): 27–43. It appears with the permission of the editors of English
in Africa.
Chapter 3.1, “Deneys Reitz and Imperial Co-option” by John Gouws,
is a revision of an essay first published in Books & Empire: Textual Production,
Distribution and Consumption in Colonial and Postcolonial Countries, edited by
Paul Eggert and Elizabeth Webby, a special issue of the Bibliographical Society
of Australia and New Zealand Bulletin 28(1–2) (2004): 73–82. It appears with
permission of the editors and BSANZ.
Chapter 3.2, “‘Consequential changes’: Daphne Rooke’s Mittee in America
and South Africa” by Lucy Valerie Graham, was first published under the
same title in Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies 10(1)
(2009): 43–58. It is reprinted by permission of the publisher, Taylor & Francis
Ltd, <http://www.tandfonline.com>.
Chapter 4.1, “In (or From) the Heart of the Country: Local and Global Lives
viii
Acknowledgements
of Coetzee’s Anti-pastoral” by Andrew van der Vlies, is a comprehensively

rewritten version of a chapter that first appeared in the author’s monograph,
South African Textual Cultures (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
2007). Acknowledgement is made to the publishers for permission to rework
this material.
Chapter 4.3, “Limber: The Flexibilities of Post-Nobel Coetzee” by
Patrick Denman Flanery, is a substantially revised version of an essay first
published in Scrutiny2: Issues in English Studies in Southern Africa 13(1) (2008).
It appears with permission of the editor of Scrutiny2, Unisa Press, and Taylor
& Francis South Africa.
Chapter 5.1, “Colin Rae’s Malaboch: The Power of the Book in the (Mis)
Representation of Kgaluši Sekete Mmalebôhô” by Lize Kriel, is a revision of
an essay first published in the South African Historical Journal 46(1) (2002):
25–41. It appears with kind permission of the editor and board of the South
African Historical Journal.
Chapter 5.2, “‘Send Your Books on Active Service’: The Books for Troops
Scheme during the Second World War, 1939–1945” by Archie L. Dick, is a
revision of an essay first published in the South African Journal for Librarianship
and Information Science 71(2) (2004): 115–26. It appears with permission of the
editors.
Chapter 6.1, “The Image of the Book in Xhosa Oral Poetry” by Jeff
Opland, is a substantial revision of Chapter 14, “The Image of the Book
in Xhosa Izibongo”, from the author’s monograph, Xhosa Poets and Poetry
(Claremont: David Philip, 1998), pp. 301–24. It has been lightly revised and
appears with permission of the author.
Chapter 6.2, “Written Out, Writing In: Orature in the South African
Literary Canon” by Deborah Seddon, is a revised version of an essay first
published in English in Africa 35(1) (2008). It appears by kind permission of
the editors of English in Africa.
Chapter 6.3, “Not Western: Race, Reading and the South African
Photocomic” by Lily Saint, is a revised and abbreviated version of an essay
first published in the Journal of Southern African Studies 36(4) (2010): 939–58.
It appears by permission of the editor and board of the Journal of Southern
African Studies and is reprinted by permission of the publisher, Taylor &
Francis Ltd, <http://www.tandfonline.com>.
Chapter 7.3, “Begging the Questions: Producing Shakespeare for Post-
apartheid South African Schools” by Natasha Distiller, is a revised version
of an essay first published in Social Dynamics 35(1) (2009): 177–91. It appears
by permission of the editors of Social Dynamics and Taylor & Francis South
ix
PRINT, TEXT AND BOOK CULTURES IN SOUTH AFRICA
Africa. A version of this work appears in the author’s Shakespeare and the
Coconuts: on post-apartheid South African culture (Wits University Press, 2012).
Individual image credits for figures in chapters 5.3 (Twidle), 6.3 (Saint),
7.1 (McDonald), and 8.2 (Law-Viljoen) appear with each image. The authors
and editor are grateful to the copyright holders and archives in question for
permission to reproduce these images.
The editor is grateful to Willem Boshoff for permission to use images of
two artworks, Death of a Typewriter and Abamfusa Lawu.
x
Abbreviations and acronyms
AES Army Education Services

ANC African National Congress
BFBS British and Foreign Bible Society
BTCJ Books for Troops Committee in Johannesburg
COSAW Congress of South African Writers
Country In the Heart of the Country
CTBTC Cape Town Books for the Troops Committee
CTLBA Cape Town Ladies’ Bible Association
DEIC Dutch East India Company
DKP David Krut Publishing
DoE Department of Education
FOSATU Federation of South African Trade Unions
GDE Gauteng Department of Education
LMS London Missionary Society
NLSA National Library of South Africa
OUP Oxford University Press
PCB Publications Control Board
SAABFBS South African Auxiliary of the British and
Foreign Bible Society
SALA South African Library Association
SAPL South African Public Library
SMAC Stellenbosch Modern and Contemporary
UCT University of Cape Town
UDF Union Defence Force
Unisa University of South Africa
US United States
WUP Wits University Press
YMCA Young Men’s Christian Association
YWCA Young Women’s Christian Association
ZAR Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek
xi
1.
INTRODUCTORY
1.1
Print, Text and Books in South Africa
In a late chapter in Boyhood (1998 [1997]), the first of J. M. Coetzee’s

fictionalised—or autre-biographical1—memoirs, the child protagonist, John
(who is based on Coetzee, although not entirely congruent with him), has
suggestive encounters with two machines. With his mother and brother,
John visits his great-aunt Annie in the Volkshospitaal in Cape Town and
stays briefly in the old woman’s flat in the southern suburbs. Here, in her
storeroom, he comes across “the book press”. Persuading his younger brother
“to lay his arms in the bed of the press”, John turns the screw so that his
brother’s “arms are pinned and he cannot escape”, then they reverse roles and,
his own arms pinned, John ponders: “One or two more turns … and the bones
will be crushed. What is it that makes them forbear, both of them?” (Coetzee
1998, 118–19). Immediately after this episode, John remembers visiting a
farm near Worcester some years previously, where the brothers had stumbled
on a machine for grinding maize. He recalls that he had coaxed his brother
similarly into placing his hand “down the funnel where the mealie-pits were
thrown in”, had “turned the handle”, and, momentarily, “before he stopped
… could feel the fine bones of the fingers being crushed” (Coetzee 1998, 119).
Coetzee’s suggestive linking of the press and the grinder associates
technologies of temporal and spiritual sustenance: the grinder produces food;
the book press had been used to print multiple copies of a “squat book in a red
binding” by his great-grandfather, Annie’s father (translated from German
into Afrikaans by her), with a portentously spiritual title, “Deur ’n gevaarlike
krankheid tot ewige genesing, Through a Dangerous Malady to Eternal
Healing” (Coetzee 1998, 117). The association forged between machines

raises the spectre of treachery and cruelty, linking the machinery of the press
with an altogether different machine, capable of doing physical harm. (One
cannot help but wonder whether Coetzee had Kafka’s suggestive story about
authority, writing, punishment and complicity, “In the penal colony”, at the
back of his mind.) This is richly suggestive for any study of print cultures
in Southern Africa, a region in which (as with other colonial contexts) the
arrival of the printing press is linked inextricably with processes that forced
autochthonous peoples into difficult encounters with modernity—encounters
that may have precipitated “progress”, but that also involved a great deal
of psychological and cultural harm. The development of orthographies
for regional vernaculars, most often by missionaries intent on conversion,
wrought immense changes in the lives of black South Africans. Leon de
Kock points out in his essay in this collection how “printing and piercing,
literacy and lubricity, disinterested information and deadly inculcation” are
often co-implicated in representations of these processes (52). The passages
from Boyhood above reflect on the costs or the potential misuse of such
technologies, and also on the implications—and implicatedness—of writing
within discourses of power and authority more broadly.
These are themes that recur in Coetzee’s oeuvre too. For example, in
Youth (2002), the second of his autre-biographical “Scenes from Provincial
Life”, John is a disaffected computer programmer in London in the 1960s. He
also spends time in the British Museum’s reading room, undertaking research
for his thesis supervisor in Cape Town and occasionally allowing
himself the luxury of dipping into books about the South Africa of the
old days, books to be found only in great libraries, memoirs of visitors to
the Cape like Dapper and Kolbe and Sparrman and Barrow and Burchell,
published in Holland or Germany or England two centuries ago (Coetzee
2002, 136–37).
John dreams of writing a book about the early years of the Cape, in the vein
of Burchell’s Travels, and ponders how he might “give to the whole the aura
that will get it onto the shelves and thus into the history of the world: the aura
of truth” (Coetzee 2002, 138). Is it these encounters, the reader is invited to
wonder, that will prompt John—if indeed he is Coetzee—to write Dusklands
a decade later?
It should not surprise us that Coetzee so movingly renders characters,
existing in some complex relationship to his own younger self, who respond so
3
INTRODUCTORY
strongly to the materiality of books—in Boyhood, John displays close attention

to the material appearance of Ewige genesing, noting that it is “printed on the
thick, coarse paper used for Afrikaans books that looks like blotting-paper
with flecks of chaff and fly-dirt trapped in it” (Coetzee 1998, 117)—and who
register the power of print in propagating influential discursive constructions
of place (particularly colonial space). Of all South African-born writers and
intellectuals of the past half century, Coetzee has been the most astutely and
rigorously concerned with the intimate relations between language and power,
and in the predicaments of writing—in both senses of the word: the stresses
under which the literary is placed in periods of political emergency (Coetzee
1988; McDonald 2004) and the implications of those institutions claiming
the right to control knowledge, interpretation or expression. Both inevitably
involve a concern with the politics of print cultures in South Africa—a subject
that Coetzee himself tried to teach, albeit briefly, at the University of Cape
Town (UCT). In his prospectus for a module entitled “The Book in Africa”,
proposed for 1980, he suggested that students on the course might investigate
a number of topics, among them issues specific to local and national book
production and consumption (“the location of bookstores in the Cape
Peninsula and the types of clientele they serve”; “library services in the
black residential areas of the Cape Peninsula”; “the histories” and “editorial
policies” of a selection of South African literary magazines; the publication
of children’s books in English, Afrikaans, and African languages in the
country—“to what extent [are they] South African in conception, authorship,
and production[?]”, Coetzee asked). However, there were also topics with a
pan-African and global focus, for example the role of “expatriate or multi-
national publishing houses in Africa” or comparisons between mass reading in
Britain in the early nineteenth century and among black South Africans in the
mid-twentieth century (Coetzee 1980/81). Students would be encouraged to
contemplate the seminal changes brought to Africa by the printing press. “If
we accept (following [Walter] Ong, [Marshall] McLuhan, [Jack] Goody) that
print changes modes of thought”, Coetzee (1980/81) wrote, “then printing
can be seen as the agent whereby the world is modernized. The print industry
and the print habit become the most important modernizing agents.”
This, notes Peter McDonald (2012, 801), sounds very like the theses of a
number of histories of the effects of the advent of print in Europe published
in the 1970s—like Elizabeth Eisenstein’s influential The Printing Press as an
Agent of Change (1979), which advanced grand claims for the influence of print
on the spread of Enlightenment ideas—although Coetzee would no doubt
have been in sympathy, too, with more recent studies that are less Whiggish
4
in their teleological conspectus (see Johns 1998) and that acknowledge the
very different conditions that exist in colonial societies (see Ballantyne 2007).
It is, however, noteworthy, McDonald comments, that nowhere in Coetzee’s
course description does he refer to any of the significant studies then
beginning to define what scholars now generally refer to as Book History, or
History (or Histories) of the Book (I will henceforth refer to “book history”
without the canonising capitals), although most would recognise similarities
between Coetzee’s aims and this interdisciplinary field. Although the module
was not offered in the following year (McDonald suggests that this had to do
with the conservative literary critical ethos in UCT’s English Department
and with the relative risk final-year undergraduate students, used to more
traditional course models, would likely have ascribed to Coetzee’s), it is clear
that Coetzee was at least an early fellow traveller with a field whose challenges
have encouraged a great deal of historical and literary scholarship in the last
30 years (see McDonald 2012, 800–3). For the purposes of emphasising not
only the contributions to knowledge made by the chapters in this volume, but
also their provocations—and their methodological usefulness—for studies
of colonial and post-colonial cultures of script, print and the book more
generally, I will linger momentarily on the contours of this field, which has
only recently come overtly to affect scholarship about print and text studies in
and of South and Southern Africa.
* * *
One of the early leading thinkers in the emerging field of book history—one
of those not cited by Coetzee—was French social historian Roger Chartier.
In his essay “Laborers and voyagers: From the text to the reader” (1992),
Chartier manages to state plainly some of the key tenets animating this
relatively new scholarly endeavour. Quoting Michel de Certeau’s claim in The
Practice of Everyday Life that texts only have meaning through readers and that
they change as readers bring new expectations and modes of reading to the
text, he argues as follows:
Readers, in fact, never confront abstract, idealized texts detached from

any materiality. They hold in their hands or perceive objects and forms
whose structures and modalities govern their reading or hearing, and
consequently the possible comprehension of the text read or heard
(Chartier 1992, 50).
5
INTRODUCTORY
A text can therefore never be approached purely as only a semantic field

(the view that had, Chartier notes caustically, hitherto dominated “not only
structuralist criticism in all its variants but also literary theories concerned
with reconstructing the modes of reception of works”); rather, “it is necessary
to maintain that forms produce meaning, and that even a fixed text is invested
with new meaning and being … when the physical form through which it is
presented for interpretation changes” (Chartier 1992, 50–51). “The task of the
historian”, he argues, ought accordingly to be “to reconstruct the variations
that differentiate the ‘readable space’ (the texts in their material and discursive
forms) and those which govern the circumstances of their ‘actualization’ (the
readings seen as concrete practices and interpretive procedures)” (Chartier
1992, 50). “Authors do not write books”, Chartier (1992, 53) suggests usefully,
“they write texts which become objects copied, handwritten, etched, printed,
and today computerized.”
Robert Darnton, one of the earliest proponents of book history in
North America (although himself primarily a scholar of ancien régime and
Enlightenment French print and book histories), concurs with Chartier:
“typography as well as style and syntax determine the ways in which texts
convey meanings”; any “history of reading” should “take account of the ways
that texts constrain readers as well as the ways that readers take liberties
with texts” (Darnton 2002, 21; see also Darnton 1990). The suggestion is
that historians—indeed, students of culture generally—ought to consider as
their proper remit “the text itself, the object that conveys the text, and the
act that grasps it” (Chartier 1989, 161). They—we—need to ascertain and
describe the material form of any text that readers have encountered, to ask
how readers encountered it and what they did with it, and to be alert to how
this might have changed from one community (and text) to the next (and the
next instantiation of a text) over time. It is in the “gap” between idealised text
and materiality, Chartier (1992, 53) insists, that “meaning is constructed”.
Some Anglo-American literary critics who were also textual scholars
had in fact been making similar suggestions in the late 1970s and the 1980s.
With reference to his own work on Romantic and Victorian poets, for
example, Jerome McGann argued that scholars ought to consider not only
a literary work’s historical contexts, but also the history of what he called its
“textualizations” (McGann 1985, 10; cf. McGann 1991, 9). How, scholars like
McGann asked, does the text of a canonical nineteenth-century English poem
or novel that is studied by university undergraduates in a scholarly edition
differ from the text of the novel encountered by its first readers? To the
bibliographer and scholarly editor’s question “how is this text different from
6
this one?”, critics attuned to what was coming to be known as book history
added such questions as “how has each instance of publication changed the
text and affected the meaning?” Also: how has this text—with or without
variation—been rendered a different work by virtue of textual variations, but
also through changing format, typography, and different co- or paratexts:
those “fringes” or margins of text, images, or other apparatus (cover, blurbs,
dedications, glossaries and so on) that constitute, Gérard Genette (1997, 2)
argues, “a zone not only of transition but also of transaction”?
Chartier and others in the early wave of influential book historians drew on
the methodology of the French Annales school of socio-economic history. A
seminal engagement of this school with the history of print came with Lucien
Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin’s 1958 L’apparition du livre, translated as The
Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450–1800 (1976). The field gained
its own scholarly journal, the Revue française d’histoire du livre (new series,
1971), and it is worth noting that English has tended to use the form of the
direct translation of the French (“history” and “book” both in the singular).2
As Robert Darnton (2002, 10), who did so much to bring together Anglo-
American and French bibliographic and historiographic traditions, explains,
what these Annales-influenced scholars did was to attempt to “uncover the
general pattern of book production and consumption over long stretches of
time” rather than to offer detailed bibliographic analysis.
A key call to constitute a break from traditional analytical and descriptive
bibliography that had long been a sub-field of literary and historical studies
came from an Oxford professor of bibliography and textual criticism, New
Zealand scholar Don (D. F.) McKenzie, whose 1985 Panizzi Lectures at the
British Library came at a seminal moment in the evolution of book history
and helped to constitute the field for a growing number of scholars in the
later 1980s. McKenzie (1986, 10) argued that bibliography could not and
should not “exclude from its own proper concerns the relation between
form, function and symbolic meaning”. As hitherto undertaken in Britain
and the United States in particular, bibliography had often merely described
the effects of the “technical … processes of transmission”, he contended,
but it should hitherto also consider the relationship between these and the
“social” processes involved (McKenzie 1986, 13). McKenzie memorably
showed the ramifications of this kind of analysis in a detailed account of
misreadings of Congreve, including, ironically, in Wimsatt and Beardsley’s
influential essay “The intentional fallacy”, which had argued (among other
things) that the literary scholar should focus on the text itself (and only on
the text). Congreve’s text had become corrupted, McKenzie showed, and
7
INTRODUCTORY
changes in the literal appearance of text—of each word’s relative position in

the typographical layout of words on the page in successive editions, excerpts
and quotations—had a direct bearing on meaning, something that Wimsatt
and Beardsley, for all their attention to the “text”, had missed. Variations bore
on “the most obvious concerns of textual criticism—getting the right words
in the right order”, McKenzie argued; variations suggested the importance of
paying attention to “the semiotics of print” (including “the role of typography
in forming meaning”) and, crucially, reflected significantly “on the critical
theories of authorial intention and reader response” (McKenzie 1986, 21).
The important point for McKenzie was to notice how an expanded set of skills,
concerns and questions were pushing bibliography in new directions, to what
he suggested was perhaps better termed “the sociology of texts”, a sociology
that would allow scholars working with texts to do nothing less than uncover
“record[s] of cultural change” (McKenzie 1986, 13). Others have made similar
claims. David Hall, for example, a leading book-history scholar in the United
States, suggested that the emerging field was “predicated on the assumption
that the better we understand the production and consumption of books, the
closer we come to a social history of culture” (Hall 1996, 1; emphasis added).
Using books to tell these kinds of stories has involved considering print not
only as produced in a particular society, but as itself “a mediating element in
cultural life”, in Joan Rubin’s words (2003, 572).
Two questions follow: how might such an expansive and ambitious task
unfold? and how do these formulations conceive of “the book” itself? If book
history has never been “just about books”, in the words of Jonathan Rose, a
leading historian of reading and popular print cultures in nineteenth-century
England, but rather about “the social history of the creation, diffusion, and
reception of the written” (Rose 1994, 462; emphasis added), where does one
draw the boundaries that mark the field? Heidi Hackel (2005, 4) offers a note
of caution, suggesting that while book history denotes a
general approach, which attends to the material details of the production

and consumption of books, it is worth exercising more specificity about
the points at which one enters the conversation. Even if the codex, rather
than the scroll, is the defining object at the center of this discipline, the
story of the book clearly begins before Gutenberg.
Darnton’s early answer to the question “What is the history of books?” had
been “the social and cultural history of communication by print” (Darnton
2002, 9; emphasis added). Jonathan Rose and Ezra Greenspan, in their
8
introduction to the first issue of Book History, the scholarly journal associated
with the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing
(the foremost international scholarly and professional society for book
history), suggested that the field encompassed “the creation, dissemination,
and uses of script and print in any medium”, which was to say “the social,
cultural, and economic history of authorship, publishing, printing, the book
arts, copyright, censorship, bookselling and distribution, libraries, literacy,
literary criticism, reading habits, and reader response” (Greenspan & Rose
1998, ix; emphasis added). In its broadest terms, then, a project might be
said to be book-historical that is interested in considering the influences of
historical, material, social, political, cultural and economic variables on the
manifestations of texts of all kinds (whether script or print) as physical objects,
and in the implication of these texts—in their material embodiments—for
circuits of circulation and use, and fields of cultural validation and contestation
through which their meanings are made and remade. The ambition of such a
field is impressive, if a little daunting. Scholars in a number of disciplines have
in recent years contributed to the field studies of dizzying variety, considering
also the imbrication of print and manuscript cultures, the history of printing
and bookselling, the emergence of institutions affecting (enabling, but also
limiting) publication and reception, and studies of what was actually read by
particular classes or communities.3
Hackel (2005, 4) observes that book history as a discipline first developed
a critical mass of scholarship in the study of three particular areas: ancien
régime France, the United States in the nineteenth century and early modern
Britain; it arose in these periods, she suggested, “because they were critical
and transitional moments in the means of production, circulation, and
consumption of texts”. These texts, or those that survive in largest number,
were printed ones. As South African scholars Isabel Hofmeyr and Lize Kriel
(2006, 14) note, northern-hemisphere book history developed “in a context in
which the idea of the book has become naturalized. Much of the scholarship
hence operates from an unstated and generally commonsensical idea of what
a book is”. Let us simply note this definitional problem, and also that tensions
about the expansiveness of the term “book” are well recognised within the
discipline—or aggregation of disciplines: “the history of the book must be
international in scale and interdisciplinary in method”, Darnton (2002, 22)
averred in the early 1980s. Hofmeyr (2001) herself has written insightfully on
“metaphorical” books in an African context. Karin Barber (2001, 13) reminds
us that a “book” produced locally in Africa—“in Onitsha, Accra, Ìbàdàn,
Nairobi, and Dar es Salaam”—might bear little resemblance to books that a
9
INTRODUCTORY
Westerner might recognise: “They merge into booklets and booklets merge
into pamphlets” and their means of distribution are often like that of other
ephemera, printed or otherwise. She has suggested that a useful way to think
about book history in Africa is via the concept of printing culture rather than
the term print culture, which implies vast and reasonably homogeneous publics
interpellated by print commodities. In Africa, printed matter often emerges
from small-scale jobbing printers with a limited and variegated reach. While
the majority of book-historical work in the modern period—the moment of
African colonialism and after—has been concerned de facto with print, we
shall see in due course that several contributors to this volume are keenly
attuned to the difficulty of excluding oral traditions and orature from the field.
What, then, about the task of following the journeys taken by books,
however loosely defined, and about their effects? Darnton’s (2002, 11)
suggestion was that we might consider what he called those “circuits of
communication” through which printed artefacts typically travel, via multiple
agents involved in an extended life cycle that includes authors, publishers,
printers (at various times before our current era these might have included
compositors, pressmen and warehousemen, but also, for Darnton, suppliers
of paper, ink and type), distributors (including agents and representatives),
booksellers (including informal traders—now we might include online sales
of physical books as well as digital downloads of electronic ones) and readers
(whether intended or not, and whether those choosing to purchase a text or
who come by it in another manner). (We might think about how, in Boyhood,
John’s great-aunt Annie had her father’s book printed and bound at her own
expense, and how she tried unsuccessfully to place it in “the bookshops of
Cape Town” before hawking it “door to door” [Coetzee 1998, 118]).
Darnton’s influential model was an attempt at providing a structure for
what was becoming a crowded interdisciplinary field, drawing together the
discrete case study models advanced by textual scholars like McGann and
printing historians and erstwhile bibliographers like McKenzie in a capacious
framework that ostensibly allowed scholars to locate the objects of their
study at different points in an encompassing whole.4 But Peter McDonald
and others have suggested that Darnton’s model privileges different actors’
functions over their relative status. In 1997 McDonald (111) noted that, just
as different publishers are more or less prestigious, each actor in the circuit
“has a changeable and, indeed, often precarious status relative to his or her
immediate competitors and to the field of production as a whole”. Here
French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s idea of the “field of cultural production”
proved highly useful for McDonald and a number of other theorists and
10
historians of the book.5 The literary field, Bourdieu (1993, 42) suggests, is a
“site of struggles in which what is at stake is the power to impose the dominant
definition of the writer”. In other words, a series of interconnected cultural
and social systems, each with its own hierarchies and overlapping structures of
authority and prestige, additionally affect authors and their books in various
struggles to determine their works’ relative cultural status, their cultural
capital. Any study of the literary field consequently requires an attempt to
reconstruct “the space of positions and the space of the position-takings … in
which they are expressed”, Bourdieu argues (1993, 29–30).
Reconstructing these spaces seemed to many in the field of literary studies
to be merely ancillary to the tasks of literary scholarship. One response was
to emphasise, as Rose does, a tension between empiricism, on the one hand,
and theoretical approaches to text, on the other, and then valorising one or
the other. Rose (1994, 462) argues, for example, that while book historians
are interested in many of the issues of general literary theoretical concern
(including authorship, the canon, readers and reading), they “find that the
work of [theorists] is based on shaky assumptions, reckless generalizations,
and guesswork”. Less confrontationally, especially if attuned to the history of
the opposition of “theory” and “history” in late- and post-colonial contexts
like South Africa’s, one might observe instead that while literary criticism has
always been concerned with the meanings of texts, book history is concerned
with how these meanings are influenced by factors often beyond the control
of authors themselves, with how they are intimately connected with (among
other pressures) those exercised by the publishing industry, agents and
editors; the ruling discourses of reviewing and the economics of bookselling
and advertising; censorship or other kinds of state control or public moral
or political pressure; the exigencies of popular reception, serialisation
or abridgement (and also educational institutionalisation); the valorising
economics of literary prize cultures; and, indeed, academic study.
If what is at issue is an imperative to chart and trace the predicaments of
text and of the textual (print or otherwise), then, as McDonald (1997, 120–
21) suggests, rather than asking what book history can contribute to literary
criticism, one might well turn the question on its head and ask what might
be the “relevance of literary interpretation to book history”. Book-historical
studies, studies in the cultures of script and print, studies of the institutions
of text or of the literary might then be all regarded as offering the prospect
of “nuanced, responsible” accounts of the vagaries of meaning and the
contingency of validating categories (including “literariness”), an account that
“refuses to accept the assurances of traditional historicism, or to define itself
11
INTRODUCTORY
against reading, criticism” and, crucially for McDonald (2003, 241), “theory”.
McDonald (2003, 231) observes that theory and book history both seek in
effect to focus on “the problematics of dissemination and its implications
for classical ideas of close reading”: theorists interested in text (implicitly
influenced, McDonald suggests, by post-structuralism—he labels them
“ahistorical textualists”) seemed to have squared up, in one understanding
of what might be thought of as a literary culture war in the 1980s and 1990s,
against bibliographers and literary sociologists (“historical documentalists”)
without acknowledging their shared concerns. “The point”, McDonald
(2003, 232) concludes, is to recognise that an interest in the literary need not
exclude a concern with the material, and vice versa. The point is, in his words,
not to celebrate the document at the expense of writing—in Derrida’s

sense of the term—but to study its attempts to contain the disruptive
forces of dissemination, and, in so doing, to make publishing history the
foundation of a larger history of reading (McDonald 2003, 232).6
McDonald expands on this in a 2006 essay, offering a description of

disparate responses not to the general question of the nature of textuality
and dissemination, but to the question of literariness itself in the wake of
what he calls “theory’s successful bid for hegemony” (McDonald 2006, 215)
in literary and cultural studies. His complex argument hinges on revisiting
Derrida’s much-quoted—even “notorious”—claim “[i]l n’y a pas de hors-texte”,
which McDonald notes has been translated variously as “[t]here is nothing
outside of the text” (by Gayatri Spivak in 1976) and “[t]here is no outside-the-text”
(by Derek Attridge in 1992) (McDonald 2006, 222). Hors-texte, McDonald
(2006, 223) notes in an original departure, is, however, also “a technical
bookmaking term roughly translated as ‘plate’ (as in ‘This book contains five
color plates’)”—hence Derrida is here indulging in a pun that invokes this
meaning alongside “hors-texte” (or “outside-the-text”), his “play on words (or
on a hyphen)”. McDonald (2006, 223) here draws our attention to “Derrida’s
lively bibliographic imagination”, suggesting that the notorious statement
“announced neither a triumphant nor a culpable break with history”. It is
worth quoting McDonald fully further:
The play on words inventively underscored Derrida’s sustained

commitment to putting in question received assumptions about what is
outside and what is thought to be inside writing. As the literal rendering
suggests (“There are no plates”), the idea that there is a secure division
12
between, say, illustrations and the main text is an illusion fostered by the
materiality of the book (e.g., by the use of special high-quality paper for
the plates). Since illustrations, like paratexts, frame writing (or vice versa)
and since writing has a capacity to exceed all frames, there can be no
assured sense of where the text proper begins or ends. … Understood
in this way, Derrida’s playful pun illustrates how his thinking connects
rather than separates theorists and book historians by pointing to their
shared interest in radically rethinking the idea of the book (McDonald
2006, 223).
For Derrida, in other words, it was never a question of the text over the
book, but rather an understanding that the text always already implies—and
requires attention to—its implicatedness in a material instantiation, or at least
in a context that makes any interpretation of [i]l n’y a pas de hors-texte as a
refusal of relation fatuous.
* * *
The redeployment of printing terminology serves in a different context to

highlight another long-running tension between theory and materiality—
although in this case it is the term’s unwitting polyvalence that is useful, and
the tension is less diffused than in other regionally or period-centred fields
of study. Isabel Hofmeyr and Sarah Nuttall contextualise their comments
about the “pressing” urgency “for a more material engagement with the text”
in “postcolonial literary studies” (hitherto too dependent “on a markedly
abstract notion of text”) through reference to Homi K. Bhabha’s “use of
the word ‘stereotype’—defined by him as an ambivalent strategy by which
colonizers pathologically re-iterate their simultaneous dread of and desire for
the colonized” (Hofmeyr & Nuttall 2001, 3, quoting Bhabha 1994, 81–82).
Stereotype, however, has another meaning, Hofmeyr and Nuttall note, in
a move not unlike McDonald’s re-reading of Derrida. This other meaning
“derives from the world of nineteenth-century printing where a stereotype is
a plaster-of-paris, papier-maché or metal mould taken from a hand-composed
page of metal type thereby allowing the page to be broken up and the type
to be used elsewhere” (Hofmeyr & Nuttall 2001, 3). There is mileage in
exploring the resonances of the latter meaning for the former: both text and
print facilitated anthropological knowledge, on which colonial authority drew
to facilitate its rule over those it interpellated as its others. Print facilitated
orthographic reduction and proselytising intrusion, serving the spread of
13
INTRODUCTORY
Western education and religion and reducing the “native” to a type whose
common traits were no less recognisable to the European than the words
and letters describing him capable of being repeated—endlessly, literally
and metaphorically—through stereotyping and metal stereotype. Print and
power, in other words, are inextricably co-imbricated.
Throughout the 1990s, materialist critics of the textual idealism of
colonial discourse analysis—of what Stephen Slemon and Helen Tiffin (1989,
x) call its flight into “a domain of pure ‘textuality’”—began themselves to
call for “assessments of the material conditions of cultural production and
consumption in post-colonial societies” (Ashcroft, Griffiths & Tiffin 1995,
463). By the time these editors of the 1995 Post-Colonial Studies Reader came
to revise the collection for a second edition, published in 2006, they could
include a number of extracts from studies of just these processes and operations
(including from Graham Huggan’s important 2001 The Postcolonial Exotic; see
Ashcroft, Griffiths & Tiffin 2006, 397–425), including engagements with the
history of the multiple textual embodiments of literary works and with the
history of their reception and commodification. Bruce King (1996, 18) had
echoed these calls, writing in the mid-1990s that attention needed to be paid
to “actual social contexts, cultural networking, and literary careers of writers”.
And these writers came to include those Homi Bhabha and Edward Said had
not been interested in uncovering—that is, those whose textual production
contested Orientalist inscription, those who did not merely mimic and
conform to stereotype (however ambivalent and fractured Bhabha allowed
for these to be). Priya Joshi (2002, 13), for example, in her study of the
novel in British India, comments that Said’s Orientalism, while doubtless
transformative for the study of colonialism, was “curiously silent on the
responses and resistances to the totalizing practices of the metropole occurring
on the ground during the colonial encounter”. Said and others following him
paid little attention to the reception of colonial representations that formed
the basis of study for colonial discourse analysis. Gauri Viswanathan’s Masks
of Conquest and Anne McClintock’s Imperial Leather likewise overlook “key
aspects of textual consumption and circulation among the subjects of empire”,
Joshi (2002, 13) contends.
In the 1990s others had noted the problems with homogenising tendencies
in post-colonial theory (and the dominance of South Asia or the Middle
East as focus in much theorising) and with its appropriation in the South
African academy. Writing in 1997, in a now famous assessment, Nick Visser
(1997, 89) noted that scholarly work on South Africa’s various literatures had
focused much on “discursive practices and conditions” and little on “material
14
and social conditions and political praxis”. Visser’s intervention might

be viewed as a hostile Marxist reading of post-structuralism, but he here
echoes widespread critiques of silences in post-colonial studies (informed
by post-structuralism) that appeared more interested in uncovering traces of
ambiguity, inconsistency and ambivalence in colonial discourse itself than in
offering nuanced historical work on the conditions of production of the texts
that had come to form a growing canon of post-colonial literatures.
Robert Young (1995, 163) countered some of these critiques of post-
colonial studies by arguing that to suggest that “a certain textualism and
idealism in colonial-discourse analysis” had taken place “at the expense of
materialist historical enquiry” was in fact to commit “a form of category
mistake”: investigations of the “discursive construction of colonialism” do not
(or need not—some clearly do) “exclude other forms of analysis”, he wrote. In
2001, in his magisterial history of post-colonialism, Young (2001, 7) argued
that it typically combined orthodox Marxist critiques “of objective material
conditions with detailed analysis of their subjective effects”, contributing
significantly to what he called “the growing culturalism of contemporary
political, social and historical analysis”. But while there is a broadly recognised
attention to the material in post-colonial studies, it is still true that nuanced
book-historical analysis is less often found, either as freestanding case history
or as a supporting component of analysis. In situating his own work, David
Attwell (in his 2005 study of black South African engagements with print and
modernity) quotes, with appreciation, some of Young’s defensive formulation.
Attwell (2005, 21) argues that his own approach occupies a “niche …
somewhere between Marxism and what has been called ‘culturalism’”, and
he refuses to see these positions as opposed. His own study, he argues, offers
an “archival emphasis … (together with … emphasis on narrative and thick
description)” in order to “[participate] in the critique and correction of early
developments in postcolonial theory, when there may have been a tendency
to homogenise and globalise the description of colonial and postcolonial
cultures” (Attwell 2005, 21).
If colonial and post-colonial book-historical scholarship has been
comparatively slow to develop and if post-colonial studies have only
relatively recently taken account of the co-implication of the material and
the discursive in textual and cultural analysis, the early twenty-first century
saw the consolidation of vibrant communities of scholars of Antipodean,
South Asian and Canadian book histories in particular, and well-developed
national book and publishing history projects in Australia and Canada (with
similarities and differences from those in the United Kingdom and United
15
INTRODUCTORY
States).7 Several related conferences outside metropolitan Europe and North

America have taken place on related themes. Robert Fraser’s Book History
through Postcolonial Eyes (2008) presented itself as a primer for the field, and
his and Mary Hammond’s double-volume Books without Borders project (2008)
collected a number of essays by emerging and established scholars working on
post-colonial and transnational book history topics.8 The Oxford Companion
to the Book (2010) made an admirable attempt at global inclusiveness, with
important survey essays on a number of post-colonial contexts.9
There is a consensus that literary studies in South Africa suffered for
much of the middle of the twentieth century from a stranglehold of new
critical impulses interested in the text alone rather than its material forms
or multiple uses. Literary scholarship was, in Sarah Nuttall’s (2002, 283)
words, long “badly served” by a “mixture of belles-lettristic and New Critical
formative pedagogical influences” that “paid little attention to the materiality
and context of texts”. Work on South African topics from a broadly book-
historical methodological perspective has, however, also gathered pace over
the last decade. For many, an understandable focus has been with economic and
political challenges to local educational and indigenous-language publishing,
or with charting what is actually being published and purchased in the country
(see Seeber & Evans, 2000; Land, 2003; Galloway 2002a; 2002b; 2004;
Galloway & Venter, 2004; 2006). There are also studies of reading formations
in Southern Africa that explore how racial and ethnic identities have been
interpolated (and interpellated) by and variously implicated in the multiple
uses of literacy and reading in projects of local and national identification and
by growing consumer cultures. Here work by Hofmeyr (1993; 2001), Archie
Dick (2004a; 2004b; 2006; 2008) and Sarah Nuttall (1994; 2004), among
others, has been especially important (see also Kruger & Shariff, 2001; Laden
2001). Patrick Harries (2001; 2007), Leon de Kock (1996), Rachael Gilmour
(2006) and others have extended a sense of the uses of printing and the book
in the mission field (about which more to follow).10
Several special issues of local South African academic journals have spoken
to book-historical concerns: an issue of African Research and Documentation
on “Reading Africa” (2000); Hofmeyr and Nuttall’s issue of Current Writing
(2001) broadly concerned with “The Book in Africa”; Hofmeyr and Kriel’s
issue of the South African Historical Journal (2006) making a case for the
development of lively interdisciplinary areas of research in South Africa; my
special issue of English Studies in Africa, “Histories of the Book in Southern
Africa” (2004), which focused on the textual conditions and transnational
institutions of literariness influencing the lives of books from the country;
16
Isabel Hofmeyr and Archie Dick’s issue of Innovation (2007); and John
Gouws’s issue of English in Africa (2008), which included papers from a
conference on Orality, Manuscript and Print in Colonial and Post-colonial
Cultures held in Cape Town in 2007 (see Gouws 2008). My own monograph
on the construction of the idea of a “South African” literature in English,
which was offered as a series of case studies of the publication and reception
histories of works regarded as canonical in the Anglophone South African
academy (from Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm onwards), appeared in
2007. Peter McDonald’s detailed and illuminating investigation of the effects
of censorship on South African literary cultures during the apartheid era, The
Literature Police, appeared in 2009. There is, however, still relatively little
work, considering the extraordinary richness of the field.
The present volume draws together representative work by some of the
labourers hitherto in this field, from South Africa and abroad, and from a
variety of disciplines. Some of these essays appeared (many substantially
revised, some rewritten) in one of the special issues, collections or monographs
cited above, or in other scholarly journals in a number of fields. Others are
original essays suggesting new directions for a field whose theoretical breadth
is energising. The coverage is not exhaustive, because this is not a history of
the book in South Africa. It is, rather, a collection of material as fascinating
and diverse as it is suggestive of methodologies—historical, historiographic,
bibliographic, literary critical, cultural studies, sociological—that might be
applied to new research in all of the areas not covered in this reader. The
chapters have been grouped in terms of coverage and theoretical application
according to several shared characteristics or objects of focus: print cultures
and colonial public spheres; South African literatures in the global imaginary;
three encounters with books by J. M. Coetzee; questions of the archive and
the uses of books; orature, image, print; ideological exigencies and strategies
of coercion; and new directions. These I will discuss in turn in the remainder
of this introduction, putting their contributions to the field in the context of
the histories of print culture in the region. This contextualisation necessitates
a brief consideration of the beginnings of print in South Africa.
II
While we do not know when the first printed text arrived in South Africa (was
it borne ashore by an early Portuguese visitor, perhaps, or even by an earlier
Chinese navigator, or washed ashore after a shipwreck?), we do know that the
printing press itself arrived relatively late: the first, by common agreement,
17
INTRODUCTORY
was operated by Johann Christian Ritter (1755–1810), who had arrived at the
Dutch-run settlement in Cape Town in 1784 to work for the Dutch East India
Company (DEIC) as a bookbinder. The governing body of the DEIC, the
Lords Seventeen, approved Ritter’s list of required materials for a complete
printing office on 28 June 1794 (Smith 1971, 12). Ritter subsequently printed
several miscellanea on a small hand press; a fragment of part of an almanac
for 1796 is the earliest surviving item (Smith 1971, 14). Despite petitioning
for the post of printer to the (now British colonial) government, that post
went first to H. H. Smith in 1799, before Sir George Yonge briefly awarded
a monopoly on printing to the firm of Walker and Robertson in July 1800.
But after its self-styled Government Printing Office was taken over by the
authorities in October 1801 (the firm had dared to issue a newspaper, The Cape
Town Gazette, and African Advertiser/Kaapsche Stads Courant, en Afrikaansche
Berichter, in August 1801), H. H. Smith became printer (see Smith 1971,
11–22),11 while Ritter remained a bookbinder (Rossouw 1987, 131, 66). For
almost the next quarter of a century, the only printing presses in the Cape
were that of the Government Printing Office controlled by the colonial
administration; in Graaff-Reinet (more on which later), and those run by the
mission stations.
Among the early commercial printing pioneers at the Cape was George
Greig (1799–1863), who ran a printing business in Cape Town from 1823 to
1835. Greig borrowed an old press from the London Missionary Society’s
(LMS) superintendent, John Philip (the LMS had two presses, which had
arrived in 1814 and 1819), before acquiring his own and publishing the first
issue of The South African Commercial Advertiser on 7 January 1824, beginning
a struggle over freedom of the press in the Cape Colony that saw him forced
to sell his press to the government and leave to pursue his case in London.
He finally returned in August 1825 with permission to resume printing
the Advertiser (Rossouw 1987, 70, 69; Smith 1971, 32–45). William Storey
Bridekirk (c1796–1843), who had arrived at the Cape in 1817 and worked
in the Government Printing Office before opening his own stationery and
bookbindery on Longmarket Street, appears to have bought the presses that
Greig was forced to sell in 1824 (Smith 1971, 40). With the encouragement
of the authorities, Bridekirk briefly published his own newspaper, The South
African Chronicle and Mercantile Advertiser, until late December 1826 (Smith
1971; Rossouw 1987, 18).
Another early pioneer influenced more directly by Greig was Louis Henri
Meurant, a farmer’s son from Berne, Switzerland, who had trained as a printer
with Greig in Cape Town in 1823 (Smith 1971, 33–35). In 1830 Meurant
18
bought at an auction in Graaff-Reinet a press that had a long history in the

colony: it had been given by one Rutt, printer at the King’s Printing House in
Shacklewell, London, to two of his former employees, Thomas Strongfellow
and Robert Godlonton, who had joined one of the settler parties to the
Eastern Cape in 1819. The press arrived with Strongfellow and Godlonton in
Algoa Bay (now Port Elizabeth/Nelson Mandela Metro) aboard the Chapman
in 1820, only to be impounded by the colony’s acting governor, Sir Rufane
Donkin. A press was considered potentially subversive, the nerves of the
colonial authorities having been exercised by Greig’s, Thomas Pringle’s and
John Fairbairn’s agitation for a free press. The confiscated press was sent to
Graaff-Reinet, where it was occasionally used to run off government notices,
before being sold at auction once the principle of the free press had been
established for the colonies (in 1827). In 1839 Meurant sold the press and
the newspaper he had established (and which he printed on it) to the very
same Godlonton with whom it had arrived in the country nearly two decades
earlier (Gordon-Brown 1979, 7–11; see also Rossouw 1987, 102, 47).
For missionaries, active in South Africa since the 1730s, printing was
essential for evangelising. LMS missionaries Dr J. T. van der Kemp and J.
Read, at Graaff-Reinet from May 1801, are generally regarded as having been
responsible for the first printing in South Africa outside of Cape Town (Smith
1971, 53). Their earliest publications, a spelling book and spelling table, have
not survived. Scholars also merely accept the account of a catechism printed
in a Khoisan language (Wilhelm Bleek lists it as Tzitzika Thuickwedi mika
khwekhwenama, or “Principles of the word of God for the Hottentot nation”)
at Bethelsdorp (near present-day Port Elizabeth) in 1803 or 1804 (Smith 1971,
54). The LMS’s Robert Moffat (1795–1883) is remembered for printing texts
in Setswana at Kuruman in the Northern Cape on a cumbersome iron printing
press that had arrived in Cape Town in October 1825 and been allocated to
Moffat in 1831 by the LMS’s superintendent in South Africa, John Philip. It
would be in use at the Kuruman station until the early 1880s (Bradlow 1987,
9, 11; Fraser 2008, 7–9). Moffat had printed a Bechuana Spelling and Reading
Book in London in 1826. His Setswana translation of the Bible appeared in
1857; the press also produced numerous tracts, periodicals, spelling books,
catechisms and hymnals (Bradlow 1987, 19; Smith 1971, 54–57).
Among the Scottish missionaries, Rev. John Ross and Rev. John Bennie
operated a Ruthven press at Tyume (“Chumie”), later Lovedale, near Alice in
the Eastern Cape from December 1823 (Smith 1971, 57). The press at Lovedale
printed Bennie’s A Systematic Vocabulary of the Kaffrarian Language in 1820
(Bradlow 1987, 10). The Methodists started printing after the Presbyterians,
19
INTRODUCTORY
but soon made up for it with their productivity—in Grahamstown from 1833
and thereafter at Fort Peddie (Bradlow 1987, 59–60; Rossouw 1987, 174).
There were a number of other Wesleyan presses in the eastern Cape Colony
from the early 1830s, run by such missionary printers as William Binnington
Boyce (noted grammarian active in the eastern Cape 1830–43, and responsible
for a[n isiXhosa] Grammar of the Kaffir Language, published in Grahamstown
in early 1834, with an expanded 1844 edition printed in London), James
Archbell, John Ayliff (who later founded what became Healdtown Institute
and compiled an isiXhosa vocabulary that was published in London in 1846),
and John Whittle Appleyard (arrived 1839, remembered for his influential
isiXhosa grammar, The Kafir Language) (Gordon-Brown 1979, 56–57;
Gilmour 2006, 73–77, 95–96). Gilmour (2006, 111) has written engagingly
about the complicated manoeuvring in print by Methodist grammarians
whose approach “relied to a large extent upon the seemingly problematic task
of removing the language from its cultural context”, demonstrating that the
complexities of the Xhosa language suggested that the Xhosa people could be
Christianised, but not that they were inherently noble (as they had earlier
been seen) (Gilmour 2006, 73). Print made the circulation—and political
usefulness—of such readings immensely influential.
Smith and Rossouw have noted the spread of printing through the rest
of the colony and into Natal—the first recorded occurrence is in 1844 in
Pietermaritzburg (Smith 1971, 93)—and what became the Orange Free
State (1846, Wesleyan Mission press at Platberg) (Rossouw 1987, 174) and
Transvaal republics (1862 at Potchefstroom) (Rossouw 1987, 16; see further
Smith 1971, 82–90 on the Cape, 91–99 on Natal, 101–4 on the Orange Free
State, and 105–31 on the Transvaal).
Print culture pre-empted—one might even say largely predetermined
the outcome of—pitched battles over identity and subjectivity in Southern
Africa: the reduction of extreme heterogeneity into varieties of difference able
to be compassed by technologies of understanding, control and ultimately
conversation (and the performance of civility) was in one way or another
dependent on print—and what print is seen to make possible. “Literacy … and
behind it the widespread introduction of print culture”, Leon de Kock suggests
in his contribution to this volume (54), “was at the centre of colonisation in
South Africa”. In nineteenth-century colonial South Africa, the introduction
and spread of print was not without physical and metaphorical battles, and
the battles not without casualties: De Kock deploys an anecdote about the
melting of lead type from the press at the Lovedale mission in the Eastern
Cape to make bullets for colonial forces during one of the brutal frontier wars
20
against the Xhosa—in this case, the War of the Axe, 1846–47—as a symbolic
event that speaks redolently of the imbrication of violence and text (52; see
also De Kock 1996, 31).
De Kock’s essay guides us through some of the key moments of mission-
directed printing in Southern Africa, among them Van der Kemp and the
Glasgow Missionary Society’s John Ross, who brought a Ruthven press with
him to the Cape Colony in 1823. De Kock argues that missionary uses of the
printing press paved the way for the forging, out of a “diverse heterocosm
of cultural identities”, of a recognisably modern—although fractured and
contested—public sphere. Invoking Benedict Anderson’s much-quoted idea
that nations are imagined communities—although De Kock notes it might
be more appropriate in the case of South Africa to refer to the imagination
of a “colonial proto-nation”—in whose self-conceptualisation print culture
acts as a key technology, strategy and mode of expression, De Kock suggests
that in colonial South Africa, “the introduction of print enabled a medial
convergence, a technological axis in whose versatile embrace all parties in
an otherwise Babelesque swirl of incommensurability could—theoretically—
both speak and be heard across time and space” (50). Thus, while it might now
be routine to argue that the history of print culture represents a turning point
in the history of South African modernity, “a midpoint … in the larger history
of colonisation and modernisation” in the region (50), it cannot be gainsaid
that the spread of print was vitally important in the difficult emergence of
South Africa as a modern state.
While some responses to the coming of print involved oppositionality,
others were more complicated and nuanced. De Kock’s essay builds on his
generalisations to develop a case study focusing on the experience of Tiyo
Soga, the first ordained black missionary minister in South Africa, charting
the implications of the contested relationship Soga’s writings and life (as
represented by subsequent mission activity as “exemplary”) present for the
forms of subjectivity and agency into which the mission experience compelled
him. Here De Kock reprises an interest in some of his earlier work in the
hybrid potentialities of such complex and multiply aligned figures, and in
their suggestiveness for understanding the development of black African
nationalism in South Africa. In “Sitting for the civilization test”, De Kock
(2001, 392) attempted to present, as a polemical “alternative” to what he
characterised as “the by now ritualized invocation of oppositionality” in
discussions of the post-colonial, “evidence of desired identification with the
colonizing culture as an act of affirmation, a kind of publicly declared ‘struggle’
that does not oppose the terms of a colonial culture, but insists instead on a
21
INTRODUCTORY
more pure version of its originating legitimation”. Many black South Africans,
De Kock (2001, 403) continued,
did not fight not to become colonial subjects, they fought to become
colonial subjects in the public realm, the res publica, in the fullest possible
sense, and they did so in the image of unalloyed imperial promise. In
the process they sought to hold to eternal shame the shoddy colonial
compromises inflicted in the name of the civil imaginary.
Soga provides De Kock with an opportunity to test his claim that, in many
cases in the history of colonial and proto-post-colonial South African history
in which print cultures can be said to have been a vehicle for the development
of a multivalent public sphere, “it is precisely the conflictual, oppositional
quality of colonial subjectivity, allegorized as a universal factor by Bhabha,
that is downplayed by ‘native’ subjects in their embracing of the undarkened
ideals of civil community in the colonial mirror” (De Kock 2001, 404–5).
De Kock continues to promote groundbreaking work on the structure
and performativity of the public sphere in South Africa (see, for example, De
Kock 2010). It is the process of conceptualising such a public sphere across
national boundaries and in a late colonial period that is the subject of the next
essay in the collection, by Isabel Hofmeyr, who over the past three decades
has been perhaps the leading instigator and senior scholar of South African
print culture studies. Among her chief interests has been the circulation of
print through and across transnational spaces, which in the process have been
reconceptualised for readers. It has long been a critical commonplace that
nations are in some senses imagined into being, that they “depend for their
existence on an apparatus of cultural fictions” (Brennan 1990, 49). All manner
of print culture has played a vital part in the building of this apparatus. Yet
there has hitherto been relatively little consideration of the role of traffic in
texts across national or colonial borders in the formation of post-colonial
“national” literary and cultural identities. These boundaries, understood as
encoding the opposition of centre and periphery, metropole and margin,
imperial capital and colony, as well as the hierarchies of political and cultural
value they are taken to represent, were once crucial to the structure of
discourse about post-colonial studies. But they have increasingly been revised
and rendered problematic by scholarship that explores what Elleke Boehmer
and Bart Moore-Gilbert (2002, 12) called the “‘thick’ empirical sense of post-
coloniality as an interactive horizontal ‘web’”, a “global network of transverse
interactions”. The “entire imperial framework becomes from this perspective
22
at once decentred and multiply centred”, Boehmer (2002, 6) writes in a study

of links and relationships between and among anti-imperial and proto-post-
colonial writers and activists. It becomes, too, one in which imperial subjects
did not always view themselves as an audience or readership narrowly limited
by their residence, wherever that may have been.
Isabel Hofmeyr (2004b, 4) has argued that the study of cultures of the book
in Africa, “[e]merging as it does in a postnationalist moment”, is well placed
to capitalise on new conceptualisations of the relationships among centres
and peripheries. She has suggested, too, that book history is “inherently
transnational”: books are
intended to circulate widely. Their portability extends their reach.

Printers and their technologies have proved equally mobile. While a
fashion for national histories of the book might have obscured some of
this mobility, book history is an ideal site from which to explore themes
of transnationalism (Hofmeyr 2010, 107).
In tracking the curious afterlives of African-language translations of Bunyan’s

Pilgrim’s Progress in her 2004 monograph, The Portable Bunyan, Hofmeyr
(2004a, 25) showed how
we have to keep our eye on the text as a material object. This procedure is
necessary in order to bring to light the intricate circuits along which texts
are funneled rather than the route we imagine or anticipate they might
traverse. One such presupposition is that texts tread predictable paths,
namely from “Europe” to “Africa”, “north” to “south”, “metropole”
to “colony”. With regard to The Pilgrim’s Progress, the commonsense
temptation is to imagine the text traveling this route, diffusing outwards
from the imperial center to the furthest reaches of empire, with apparently
little consequence for the context from which it emanated.
The essay by Hofmeyr in this volume joins her other scholarship in providing
a model for this kind of work. It argues that the missionary publishing projects
of nineteenth-century Southern African Protestant evangelical organisations,
like the Cape Town Ladies’ Bible Association, provide vivid and suggestive
instances of how transnational communities were imagined by influential
actors in the spread of one important kind of print culture. She questions a
“tendency” that regards “broad social processes like imperialism, Christian
missionary activity and so on as transnational” (75) while simultaneously
23
INTRODUCTORY
conceptualising of individual colonial subjects as strictly and only bound

by identification with the local (and the proto-national). Instead, Hofmeyr
argues, those involved in transnational organisations “formulated ways of
reading to support and give substance to their view of a worldwide network
of readers” (75), one with shared supranational characteristics and affiliations.
Hofmeyr’s recent work in this vein (2008; 2010) has examined print cultures
that traverse lines of affiliation across and around the Indian Ocean rim,
establishing a web of interrelationships and spheres of shared languages and
identifications. She argues that these “public spheres” are to be seen constituted
in “the cross-cutting diasporas” found between the 1880s and First World War
in ports along the east coast of Africa, the coasts of the Arabian Sea and Bay
of Bengal, Ceylon/Sri Lanka, western Australia, and the islands of the Indian
Ocean, and “the intellectual links” among these diasporas, “based particularly
around ideas of social reform and religious revivalism” (Hofmeyr 2010,
108). Referring to the huge volume of circulated material, from India, Egypt
and elsewhere throughout and around the ocean rim, Hofmeyr (2010, 108)
suggests that this expansive tracing of circuits of trade and affiliation unsettles
at least one “deeply seated assumption … in studies of book history”, namely
“that a printed document is necessarily a commodity situated in a network of
commercial and capitalized relations”. What studying traffic across and around
the Indian Ocean allows, she suggests, is a view of a world of relations equally
dependent on “philanthropy, commerce, craft and mechanization” (Hofmeyr
2010, 108). The portability of books routinely “extends their reach”; if “a
fashion for national histories of the book might have obscured” some of the
complex examples of extreme mobility Hofmeyr has made such fine work of
tracking (this includes her work on the African afterlives of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s
Progress), book history offers us “an ideal site from which to explore themes of
transnationalism”, she contends (Hofmeyr 2010, 107).
Meg Samuelson’s work on Indian Ocean imaginaries shares this impulse
to shift attention from centre–periphery studies to the axis of South–South
relations. Her essay in this volume considers the case of an extraordinary
epistolary and print exchange among three remarkable individuals from South
Africa and India in the late 1920s and 1930s: V. S. Srinivasa Sastri, the first
agent of colonial India in South Africa; Marie Kathleen Jeffreys, an archivist
in the Cape Town Archives; and P. Kodanda Rao, Sastri’s personal secretary.
Jeffreys attended a lecture given by Sastri in Cape Town in November 1928 and
was thrown into turmoil by an encounter with an Indian who did not conform
to her imperial(ist) stereotype. Rao accompanied Sastri on his 1928–29 visit to
South Africa, and subsequently entered into a long-running correspondence
24
and friendship with Jeffreys. Encouraged by their correspondence, Jeffreys

embarked on a project of intensive research on India, her letters reporting on
her reading of everything “from accounts by retired Raj administrators to ‘racy
and entertaining’ tales” (95). While at first informed by a conceptualisation of
India as peripheral and subservient within the British empire, what Samuelson
calls “a North-South axis feeding studies of India into the Cape Town library
system”, the Jeffreys–Rao correspondence allowed this white South African to
“bypass the North”, engaging in (and fostering) “an alternative South–South
axis of textual circulation” (95). Samuelson’s sophisticated use of archival
material explores how this exchange participated in the textual production
of a public sphere in and between these countries in the late-imperial period.
Prompted in large measure by her Indian correspondents, Jeffreys went
on to produce a number of important essays on the creole nature of South
African cultures, which Samuelson discusses elsewhere (2007). Samuelson’s
work points towards a more nuanced understanding of the history of the
imagining of South Africa as a plural place, marked by creolized cultures,
and one that has long been enriched by the coming of those marked by a
dominant discourse as strangers.
In a recent essay, Hofmeyr (2010, 112–14) makes mention of the spread
of press ownership among members of Durban’s Indian community at the
turn of the twentieth century: Tamil journalist P. S. Aiyar launched three
newspapers, Indian World (1898), Colonial Indian Times (1899–1901) and
African Chronicle (1908–21; 1929–30), in Tamil and English; Osman Ahmed
Effendi ran Durban’s first Muslim newspaper in Durban, Al-Islam, between
1907 and 1910, and followed this with Indian Views (1914), both papers
appearing in English and Gujarati; Gandhi himself launched a newspaper,
Indian Opinion, in 1903, later to be run by his son, Manilal, from the time of
Gandhi’s departure from South Africa in 1914 until the 1960s. Both Hofmeyr’s
and Samuelson’s engagements with Indian Ocean imaginaries suggest the
range of work that still remains to be done in this fascinating area—and in the
area of print cultures in minority diasporan languages and cultures in South
Africa itself. In relation to South Africa’s Islamic communities, for example,
Shamil Jeppie, who has been so engaged with the preservation of Timbuktu’s
rich manuscript heritage (including in a project funded in part by the South
African government; see Jeppie and Diagne [2008]), has written about some
South African Muslims’ cultures of print (Jeppie 2007, 45–62). Muhammed
Haron (2001) has brought to wider attention the rich history of Islamic
libraries, especially in the Western Cape. In similar vein, Saarah Jappie has
explored a twentieth-century Cape Town imam’s library (2009). But much
25
INTRODUCTORY
else remains to be done, as it does in the field of publishing in Yiddish and

Hebrew. South Africa’s first Yiddish newspaper, Der Afrikaner Israelit (The
African Israelite), a weekly published in Johannesburg, appeared for a period
of only six months in 1890 (Poliva 1961, 17; 1968, 56).12 Der Kriegstaphet
(The war dispatch), the first Yiddish daily, appeared in Cape Town for less
than three months in late 1899 (Poliva 1961, 7). Most other papers serving a
Jewish readership (in English or Yiddish) were equally short-lived, and when
Joseph Poliva compiled his list of such periodicals in the early 1960s, only
one still appeared to be running, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency Bulletin, which
had appeared since 1948 (twice weekly, then five times a week after 1953).
South African Jewry was among the wealthiest diasporic Jewish communities
globally at least until the 1960s (Segal 1963, 17); a nuanced study of the
community’s engagement with print culture in the region would no doubt be
illuminating. So too would work on the lives of books brought to the country
by other of its many immigrant communities (to name only a few: Greek and
Greek-Cypriot, Lebanese, Lusophone, Taiwanese, and former Yugoslav).
* * *
The interest evident in Hofmeyr’s and Samuelson’s essays in the complex

transnational energies at play in the circulation of print and text leads us
naturally to the interest shared, in the essays included in the section of this
volume that follows, in the effect on texts of variously construed local and
global imaginaries, and in the fates of texts that are subject to transnational
reading practices and that confront—and evoke—new and different affective
relations, sometimes in and through different textual guises.
John Gouws (Chapter 3.1) considers the publication and reception
contexts of an influential memoir by a leading post-Anglo Boer War Afrikaner
icon, Deneys Reitz. Herinneringen van den Engelschen Oorlog 1899–1902 was
completed in 1903, during Reitz’s exile in Madagascar. The published text of
Reitz’s Commando: A Boer Journal of the Boer War (1929) differed in several
crucial respects and, as Gouws argues, the memoir’s textual history offers “an
interesting instance not so much of how authors’ books change empires, but
of how empires and the demands they make on those who negotiate their
self-understood lives within them change authors and their books” (119).
Between these two publication dates, Reitz had become involved in the
project of endorsing and promoting the vision of Louis Botha, the Union of
South Africa’s first prime minister and another Anglo-Boer War veteran, for a
unified (white) dominion. Gouws shows how the textual revisions Reitz made
26
after 1924, when J. B. M. Hertzog came to power and began the promotion
of Afrikaner nationalism, actively work to promote reconciliation between
white English speakers and Afrikaners. The changes, he argues, balance local
and imperial perspectives and imperatives, and, in tracing them, Gouws seeks
to demonstrate how such close attention to text remains constitutive of one
important strand of book-historical method.
Lucy Graham’s essay (Chapter 3.2) considers some of the “consequential
changes” made to different editions of an important and too-often overlooked
mid-twentieth-century South African novel, Mittee by Daphne Rooke
(1951)—“the most popular South African writer in America” in the 1950s,
Graham notes (121). The first British edition of the novel included a scene in
which a black man rapes a black servant, while the first American edition, by
contrast, included a typical “black peril” narrative featuring the rape of a white
woman by black men. Graham’s research shows that Rooke initially wrote the
latter version, but that the left-wing British publisher Victor Gollancz, fearful
that the novel would run foul of the South African censors, compelled the
change. However, the change was not made in the Houghton Mifflin edition
published in the United States. Graham considers how such changes reflect
the expectations of different markets and examines the consequences of having
multiple versions of the same work in circulation. She takes as her point of
departure the judgment by J. M. Coetzee (2001, 211) that, “[t]o her credit”,
Rooke did “not indulge in the ne plus ultra of colonial horror fantasies, the
rape of a white woman, though she does come close to it”. Coetzee’s comments
seem uncontroversial when read in an afterword included in a reprint of the
1951 Gollancz text, but when his text was reproduced in a 2008 reprint of
the American text, a contradiction appeared. For here, as Graham observes,
“Coetzee mentions Rooke’s avoidance of a ‘black peril’ scene”, and yet the
text contains the representation of the rape of Letty, a white character, by a
black man (122).
If these chapters chart the likely reasons for—and the effects of—textual
variation in which the author is complicit (even if the effects on reading and
the implications for future paratexts are not predictable), the third essay in this
section (Chapter 3.3), Rita Barnard’s engaged and suggestive consideration
of the fate of Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country in the ambit of Oprah
Winfrey’s television and online Book Club, examines the potential of certain
texts for near-endless reinterpretation and appropriation in contexts in which
authorial intent is not at issue. First published in New York in February
1948 (and in London the following September), Paton’s most famous novel
provides a compelling example of the implication of a South African novel
27
INTRODUCTORY
in these global economies. By the mid-1950s it had been dramatised, filmed,

abridged, condensed and incorporated into school curriculums; it had become
a multimedia phenomenon for a global audience, despite what many South
Africans may have thought of its Christian humanism (see Van der Vlies 2007,
71–105). During the final quarter of 2003 it was chosen as the second novel
to be featured on Winfrey’s revamped Book Club, and the literary academic
drafted in to serve as the expert to answer online questions posed by Oprah’s
readers was Rita Barnard, one of the most astute contemporary critics of
South African cultures and the global sphere. In response to my invitation
to contribute to a 2004 journal special issue, Barnard offered an insightful
account of her experience with what she calls the Oprah “megatext”, exploring
the implications of Oprah’s selection of Paton’s novel both for the history of
the novel’s reception and for “the international consumption of South African
literature and of ‘South Africa’ as mediascape at the present moment” (144).
Barnard argues that Cry, the Beloved Country’s co-option by Oprah presents
a new departure in its reception history in which it becomes one narrative
among many, including of Winfrey herself (and her charitable activities in
South Africa), “under the auspices of a well-meaning (if commercially driven)
ethic of emotional similitude” (155). Barnard concludes polemically, speaking
to the imperative for book history to consider transnational audiences and
sites of commodification, and that nations may well “come to signify in a new
way—as mediascapes, occasions for certain kinds of stories and … certain
kinds of touristic experiences” (155).13
The potential methodological suggestiveness of the essays in this section
of the present volume is clear: not only do they remind us that we should
pay attention to which version of a work we are reading (students and even
some scholars of modern literature in particular still need to be reminded of
this fact rather too frequently), but they point to the presence of ideological
exigencies in the ways in which texts come to have unpredictable afterlives.
It matters that one is reading the version of Mittee first published in the
United States rather than the one that appeared in Britain, particularly if
a paratext (like Coetzee’s), which refers to one version, is reproduced in an
edition that uses another. In a more recent example, a discussion of the ethics
of representing and appropriating narratives of trauma, and especially of
the place of fiction in a work ostensibly of non-fiction, would play out very
differently in a classroom whose students had read the American rather than
the South African and British version of Antjie Krog’s Country of My Skull, as
Laura Moss has illustrated so convincingly (2006; see also Sanders 2007, 160).
* * *
28
How attentive we ought to be to the location, material conditions and

textual variations among versions of a text is worth considering in relation
to the writer who is arguably South Africa’s most famous literary novelist
(even if he is no longer resident in the country), but whose work’s contested
designation as “South African” itself demands book-historical scrutiny. I am
referring, of course, to Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee, with reference to whose
autre-biographical Boyhood this introduction began. On the occasion of
accepting the CNA Prize, one of South Africa’s most prestigious literary
awards, for his third novel, Waiting for the Barbarians, Coetzee (1981, 16)
mused on whether it was a “good idea”, even “a just idea” to regard South
African literature in English as a “national literature, or even an incipient
national literature”. The country existed in relation to Western Europe
and North America, the “centres of the dominant world civilization”, like
that of “province to metropolis”, he suggested polemically. South African
writers were not “building a new national literature”, he continued, but
should instead resign themselves to contributing to “an established provincial
literature”. This was not to admit mediocrity, he was quick to point out, but
rather to embark on a project of “rehabilitating the notion of the provincial”
(Coetzee 1981, 16). How has Coetzee’s work itself negotiated the tensions
between being provincial and metropolitan or local and global? The next
three essays in this collection all consider the vexed question of the category
of the national in relation to writing like Coetzee’s, exploring whether book-
historical consideration of his works’ material histories might add to an
understanding of particular works, of his oeuvre in general, and of local and
global institutions of literature (and literariness) in the globalised marketplace
for fiction. The novels discussed are In the Heart of the Country (Chapter 4.1),
Foe (Chapter 4.2) and Slow Man (Chapter 4.3).
In my discussion of Coetzee’s second published novel, In the Heart of the
Country (1977; 1978), I explore the material predicaments of a work that,
significantly, has two textual versions: one almost wholly in English, published
in Britain and the United States (making it the first of Coetzee’s works to be
published outside of South Africa); the other, a local South African edition
published by Ravan Press, with long passages of untranslated dialogue in
Afrikaans. I ask what the fact of the novel’s multi-textual history contributes
to an understanding of Coetzee’s oeuvre and what its material history suggests
about his engagement with the idea of a national literature. This essay includes
much of the text of a chapter from my 2007 monograph, South African Textual
Cultures, substantially rewritten to take account of new work by Hermann
Wittenberg and Peter McDonald.
29
INTRODUCTORY
In the second essay of this Coetzee cluster, Jarad Zimbler discusses

the South African publishing contexts of Foe, suggesting that metropolitan
readers who did not have access to the local Ravan Press edition of the novel
necessarily experienced it differently to readers in South Africa who were
aware of the implications of its publication by a radical press. Derek Attridge
(1992, 217) suggests that as soon as a work is regarded as being part of a
canon, it risks becoming dehistoricised: the canon can “dematerialize the acts
of writing and reading while promoting a myth of transcendent human truths
and values”. Foe famously draws attention to its own intertextual relation
to a “canonical” text. By exploring issues of marginality, it (and Coetzee’s
oeuvre more generally, Attridge argues) reveals and challenges the silences
in and of the canon. Zimbler’s essay seeks to perform a similar operation,
suggesting that Foe has, ironically, suffered a fate not unlike that which it is
concerned thematically to undermine. A failure to pay proper attention to
“Foe’s relationship with the South African cultural and literary fields” has,
he argues, “prevented the novel from ‘saying’ certain things and limited its
significance to a broad, theoretical concern with cultural production and the
position of the sexual and racial ‘other’” (195-6).
Patrick Denman Flanery’s essay attends not to the publication contexts
of a Coetzee novel as such, but rather to the contexts of publication of two
fragments of his 2005 novel, Slow Man: excerpts that appeared in an anthology
in aid of the victims of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami; and a heavily
edited section of the novel (then forthcoming) that appeared in The New
Yorker magazine in June 2005. Both instances signify Coetzee’s determined
distancing of himself from attempts to label him exclusively a “South African”
writer, Flanery argues, but they also shed fascinating light on the fates of
post-colonial writing at the hands of institutions of global publishing and
cultural validation, with wide ramifications for the study of literariness and
globalisation. Flanery—who has elsewhere written about the textual history
of The Lives of Animals and Elizabeth Costello (Flanery 2004)—brings to this
examination (in addition to a novelist’s eye) a theoretical concern for the
implications of adaptation and abridgement, both animating preoccupations
of some recent book-historical and textual-cultural scholarship. Citing an email
exchange with Coetzee, in which the novelist suggested that he considered
“the first edition” to be “the definitive text” (“[p]re-published drafts or edited
excerpts do not, from that point of view, count”) (quoted in Flanery’s chapter
in this volume), Flanery takes issue with Coetzee’s privileging of the first-
edition text:
30
Contributions to what has come to be known as “Book History” have

taught us over the past decades that every instance of a text, every site of
publication, including excerpts, serializations and later critical editions
(which, with Coetzee, seem an inevitability), influences its afterlife. What
this particular case of the changing shape of Coetzee’s text—which we
know most conventionally as Slow Man—demonstrates is that the author,
even the critically lauded and globally garlanded author, ultimately is not,
and cannot be, entirely in control of his own text(s) (220).
A focus on work by J. M. Coetzee is not intended to suggest that his work is

necessarily exemplary (except insofar as the attention paid in the three essays
included here to the circumstances of publication of three texts from different
stages of this author’s career), but provides three models for the kinds of work
on writers’ careers that might be attempted on a number of South African
authors—of fiction, non-fiction, poetry and drama. Reassessment of writers’
works should, in other words, take a form other than the hagiographic,
biographical or New Critical, these essays suggest.
* * *
The next section includes three quite different studies, each attending to the
uses of books in a productive and distinctive manner. All, however, share a
concern to show how books—and collections of books—evade the designs of
monologic interpretation. They are portable, they invite unsettling readings—
and they are not always what they purport to be. One such imposter is the
subject of Lize Kriel’s lively chapter (Chapter 5.1): Malaboch or Notes from My
Diary on the Boer Campaign of 1894 against the Chief Malaboch of Blaauwberg,
District Zoutpansberg, South African Republic to which Is Appended a Synopsis of the
Johannesburg Crisis of 1896, by Colin Rae, an English priest, published in Cape
Town and London. Rae worked for six years in Kruger’s Zuid-Afrikaansche
Republiek and based his book on his experiences as chaplain to the English
members of a commando raised against the unfortunate Kgoši Kgaluši, or
Mmalebôhô (Rae’s Malaboch). Despite being increasingly recognised as
flawed, unreliable and even plagiarised, Rae’s text continued to be treated
as a reliable source in historiography on the Boers’ campaign against Kgoši
Kgaluši’s people. Kriel asks “why historians, normally priding themselves on
the authority of their narratives on the grounds of their close scrutiny of ‘the
facts’, failed to detect the flaws in the Rae text for so long” (228), and in
so doing offers a consideration of the textual imperatives of representations
31
INTRODUCTORY
of racial conflict in Southern Africa. Her essay poses challenging questions

about the use of sources by historians and historiographers of colonial-era
Southern Africa—with resonances for historiographic projects in other
colonial contexts.
Archie Dick is interested in quite different books and their uses. His essay
(Chapter 5.2) offers an engrossing account of the operation of the Books for
Troops scheme in South Africa during the Second World War, which saw the
South African Library Association (SALA) exploit an opportunity “to promote
the democratic values of books, ideas and libraries” (in Dick’s paraphrase).
It was perforce neither as extensive nor successful as the American Armed
Services Editions (see Rabinowitz 2010), but nonetheless promoted reading
to many black soldiers, while also promoting to white soldiers the possibility
of “an inclusive South African national identity” (249). Dick’s essay points
the way to more engaged and less descriptive work in library and information
studies, sheds light on the reading and collecting tastes of South Africans at
mid-century, and is an important contribution to a growing field of enquiry.
Hedley Twidle’s sophisticated and provocative essay (Chapter 5.3),
written specifically for this collection, explores the challenge posed for studies
of orature, print and textuality in South Africa, by another project to collate
(like Rae) and collect and disseminate (like SALA)—in this case the Grey
Collection, which had its beginnings with the 5,200 items donated by Sir
George Grey, outgoing governor of the Cape Colony, to the South African
Library (now the National Library of South Africa, Cape Town) in 1861.
Grey had by that date served as governor of South Australia (1840–45), New
Zealand (1845–53) and the Cape (1854–61); he would go on to serve once
more as governor of New Zealand (1861–68), and later as MP and premier
there. Twidle muses on the fact that this extraordinary collection—including
a Shakespeare First Folio and valuable incunabula, as well as seminal texts on
early ethnography, natural history and philology from South Africa, Australia
and New Zealand—is chronically under-used, and this leads him to ponder
how its organisation invites or frustrates use, and what this might imply for
the colonial archive more broadly. The collection offers opportunities for
studies of South–South links across various imperial spaces, including of
comparative approaches to the study of autochthonous languages and the
challenge their alterity was early regarded as posing to European modes of
intellectual organisation and engagement. And yet, as Twidle observes, a
dilemma in studying such collections in a post-colony is the constant return
to organisational models inherited from the colonial period. “A point of
departure from this familiar paradigm”, Twidle suggests,
32
might be to balance an attention to that rather abstract imaginary of

accumulated texts and tropes—‘the colonial library’—with a more
materialist account of ‘the library in the colony’. How are specific
institutions and collections established within an expanding ‘world system’
in the nineteenth century? How are they marked by their local context
and in what ways does this determine the problems and possibilities
associated with their use today? (258).
Twidle attempts to answer some of these questions, specifically with attention

to |Xam and !Kung material famously transcribed by Wilhelm Bleek and
Lucy Lloyd, and to Bleek’s role as the first librarian of the Grey Collection.
While Twidle’s essay comments on the wealth of knowledge about
autochthonous languages held in the Grey Collection and on the hegemony
of English in post-apartheid discourses of governance (and the so-called
African Renaissance), the three essays that follow chart different courses
through fascinating material that bears on some of the same concern with the
“otherness” of other cultures of communication, and with their fates after (and
imbrication with) technologies of print: Xhosa oral and performance culture,
contemporary performance poetry and orature, and mid-century photonovels.
In the first of these essays (Chapter 6.1), Jeff Opland, long a leading scholar
of oral cultures in South Africa, offers a thoroughgoing and suggestive survey
of the appearances of representative ideas of the book in oral performances
in isiXhosa. “If the technology of print introduced by whites was eager to
absorb Xhosa oral traditions and if in the course of time it nurtured black
contributors to the print media”, Opland writes, what, he wonders, “was
the complementary attitude of Xhosa oral poetry to white culture?” (289).
Considering how the Xhosa oral tradition interacted with white technologies
of writing and of print, Opland examines first the depiction of books in
praise poetry of the nineteenth century, before turning to the cases of two
literate poets writing and performing in isiXhosa in the twentieth: Nontsizi
Mgqwetho, a Christian convert working in Johannesburg in the 1920s and
a significant early woman writer in isiXhosa; and David Yali-Manisi, among
the most important of the iimbongi in recent South African history, whose
work has a fascinating history of print and performance—and a contested
legacy. Opland almost single-handedly rediscovered and—with the help of
Phyllis Ntantala, Abner Nyamende and Peter Mtuze—translated Mgqwetho’s
important body of work (see Opland 2007). His relationship with Yali-
Manisi—a not uncomplicated one of observation, facilitation, collaboration
and promotion—has been written about by Opland himself (2005) and, more
33
INTRODUCTORY
recently, subtly and judiciously by Ashlee Neser (2011). In this representative

engagement with a long history of performed poetry in isiXhosa, a thorough
revision of a chapter from his 1998 monograph, Xhosa Poets and Poetry, Opland
shows how writing and print cultures were early associated with white colonial
oppression in the region, and explores the implications of what appears still to
be the case of oral technology’s apparently unwavering rejection of writing.
Deborah Seddon’s essay (Chapter 6.2) engages with the difficulty of
representing orature in the South African literary canon while, in the author’s
words, “promoting recognition of [...] its existence as an oral form” (306).
Seddon engages with scholarship on orality and orature in the region,
discusses the work of important but under-studied poets like Ingoapele
Madingoane, and looks to the future negotiation of technologies of orality
with print. In so doing, her work both revisits some of the issues canvassed
in Opland’s and, in its polemical openness to the difficulties of producing a
document or platform receptive to the form of contemporary orature in South
Africa, points intriguingly towards possible future uses of print—and other
technology, perhaps visual and recorded sound—in South Africa, in particular
in institutions of higher learning. Seddon’s concern with the politics of
representation and collection and with technologies of reproduction puts her
work in dialogue, too, with Twidle’s essay. She takes her cue from Hofmeyr’s
suggestion that the initial confrontation between orality and literacy in parts
of South Africa had often “unpredictable” consequences for the relationship
between writing and print; Hofmeyr showed how orality “transforms—
or oralises—literacy, rather than the other way around”, Seddon notes. She
wishes to turn to consider this “capacity for transformation” by examining
how selected contemporary black South African poets “consistently viewed
the print medium, alongside the continued deployment of oral forms, as an
important means to ensure the preservation, education and dissemination of
South African orature” (307–8).
Lily Saint’s 2010 essay on photonovels (or photocomics) in South Africa
between the 1960s and 1980s has been condensed and revised for this collection
from the Journal of Southern African Studies. In this revised version (Chapter
6.3), Saint considers the contexts of a number of publications that used staged
photographs and text, most often employing narrative conventions associated
with romance, thrillers and Westerns. Publications like Great, Kid Colt, Tessa,
Dr. Conrad Brand, Grensvegter, and See: Romantic Adventures in Photos enjoyed
enormous success. What energises Saint’s analysis is the speculation that these
publications had readerships that cut across boundaries of class and—most
importantly—race. Her evidence points in particular to black readers being
34
more likely to read publications intended for white readers. Saint’s fascinating
exploration of the semiotics of race in some of these publications points to
hitherto unremarked fractures in the facade of white popular culture that,
according to popular wisdom, celebrated racial purity. What Saint finds is that
many of these publications employed what she calls “polyvocal, extra-literary
discourses even when they attempt, particularly in their reliance on hyper-
stylised genres, to reify narrative monolingualism” (Saint 2010, 944). As a
consequence, she suggests, they attest the difficulty of apartheid’s attempts
“to erase the mixture that was not only a part of everyday life in South Africa
but even a part of Afrikaner heritage—and whiteness—itself” (Saint 2010,
944). Popular culture can be unconsciously subversive. This Saint illustrates
in fascinating detail, demonstrating how the apparently ideologically empty
appropriation of the Western photocomic form (and especially photocomics
with quasi-“Wild West” narratives) “provided more heterogeneous modes
through which to read race, poking holes in the apartheid screen of vision by
fostering practices of interracial readership that crossed legal, imaginative and
narrative boundaries” (342).
* * *
An interest in legal and institutional restrictions on reading (and restrictions

on ideologically motivated attempts to structure encounters with texts in
particular ways) preoccupies the essays in the penultimate section of this
collection. Peter McDonald’s essay (Chapter 7.1) obliquely approaches
the operation of apartheid-era South Africa’s censors (the subject of his
2009 monograph, The Literature Police): the subject of the readings that he
discusses, D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, is obviously not a work
by a South African author, but McDonald’s examination of the censorship
system’s engagement with this novel and the problem of obscenity teases
out its implications for a broader understanding of the form and nature of
institutional reading and the policing of “literature” in white South Africa.
The evidence provided by this case study suggests that the censorship system
effectively confused distinctions between censorship on moral and political
grounds: all censorship, in effect, became political. “The issue was never
really empirical anyway (‘what are public morals?’)”, McDonald argues; “it
was always and only political (‘who decides?’)” (366).
This same question is arguably at the heart of any decision about
literariness, as McDonald argues in his 2006 PMLA essay (discussed earlier in
this introduction). Here he replaces his earlier characterisation of opponents
35
INTRODUCTORY
in a book-history-vs-theory culture war as “historical documentalists” and

“ahistorical textualists”, respectively (McDonald 2003), with a dichotomy
between “skeptical antiessentialis[ts]” and “enchanted antiessentialists”
(McDonald 2006, 217, 219), who are distinguishable on the basis of their
definition of X in the formulation “‘X said, ‘This is literature’”—where the
demonstrative [is] understood performatively” (McDonald 2006, 217). The
former are those for whom the identity of X is variously some form of community
or sphere that might function in reader-response, sociological or materialist
explanations (McDonald discusses Stanley Fish’s idea of the interpretive
community, Bourdieu’s field and Terry Eagleton’s analysis of class in the rise of
English studies as examples of formulations of sceptical anti-essentialism). The
“enchanted antiessentialists”, on the other hand, might answer that X denotes
“writing itself”—McDonald discusses Barthes and Blanchot (the former still
historicist, the latter concerned with the otherness of the literary; we might
here compare Derek Attridge’s [2004] idea of literature’s singularity).
Apartheid-era censors did not operate with such nuanced categories of
response, but their insistence on thorough—and, thankfully for researchers
like McDonald, thoroughly documented—deliberations on the nature and
degree of undesirability of writing produced in or imported into South Africa
provides us with rich material for materialist and theoretical engagement.
Asking “who decides?” and charting how they do so and with what results
are key undertakings of research into book cultures and the institutions
of literature. It substantially enlarges our understanding of cultural and
political authority.
The next essays consider different aspects of this process of decision making,
and its effects. South African-born, Netherlands-based scholar Margriet van
der Waal (Chapter 7.2) asks who selects books for study in post-apartheid
schools and how they make their decisions: she focuses on the Gauteng
Education Department’s decision in 2001 to remove Nadine Gordimer’s 1981
novel July’s People from the list of recommended reading for the province’s
high schools. Gordimer’s was not the only text considered inappropriate for
learners in Gauteng secondaries: “Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar was described as
a sexist play that ‘elevates men’. Hamlet was deemed unsuitable for classroom
reading because the text is not ‘optimistic or uplifting’” and “Athol Fugard’s play
My Children, My Africa! was considered inappropriate as educational material
… because ‘learners in multicultural classrooms should not be subjected to
literature which negatively reflects the sordid socio-economic past’”, Van der
Waal explains (369). But debate about Gordimer’s text in particular became
a lightning rod for disgruntlement at the new censors in the post-apartheid
36
bureaucracy and provides fascinating material for an examination of the

operation of the field of educational validation (and political reading) at a
particular moment in South Africa’s recent history. The public debate that
followed the Education Department’s initial decision “points to the fact that a
number of contested issues are of continuing importance in the discourse on
literature education in South Africa”, Van der Waal concludes, not least “the
role and value of the Western canon and the challenges posed to its reputed
universalism”, and an “insistence by actors in the literary field that it should
be their prerogative to make selections for literature education, and not that
of actors and institutions in other fields” (381).
The supposed universality of the Western canon is also explored by the
final essay in this cluster, by Natasha Distiller, a leading scholar of the afterlives
and uses of Shakespeare’s plays in Southern Africa (see Distiller 2005; 2009).
She offers an intriguing account of the investments in Shakespeare as model of
“universal” values in a post-colonial, only partially Anglophone society and of
the manner in which these investments have operated—often perniciously—
at the textual level in numerous editions of Shakespeare produced for South
African schools. Distiller argues that “work done in universities in the past
few decades has had little effect on the teaching of Shakespeare in schools”
in South Africa, apart from “disseminating an awareness that Shakespeare
has become contested territory” (399). In South Africa, such “awareness is
often used defensively”, she writes, in reaction to what is assumed to be “an
‘Africanist’ and thus an apparently anti-‘European’ (in other words, white)
position” (399). The investment in “Shakespeare” made by Anglophone South
African society can be read variously in the manner in which educational
editions of Shakespeare plays have been produced and promoted in South
Africa. To explore how this works, Distiller examines versions of Macbeth in
a number of editions—the Shakespeare Schools Text Project published by
Macmillan; Maskew Miller Longman’s Active Shakespeare series; Walter
Saunders et al.’s Introducing Shakespeare abridgements (subsequently the
“Shakespeare 2000” editions that offered parallel modernised and “original”
texts); and the Wits Schools Shakespeare Macbeth, published by Nasou Via
Afrika in 2007—in order to pose this question: “How much does Shakespeare
really matter in post-apartheid South African cultures if an outdated version
is in circulation within a society that seems to be very busily working through
its complex definitions of ‘culture’ none the worse (if none the better) for
it?” (402). A polemical account by a leading scholar of contemporary South
African cultural formations and of Shakespeare and Early Modern studies in
post-colonial contexts, this essay will be of interest to Shakespeare scholars
37
INTRODUCTORY
internationally, as well as to students of textual cultures and cultural politics

in post-colonial contexts.
* * *
The final grouping of chapters is headed “New Directions” and is intended

to suggest the kinds of questions—theoretical, economic, cultural materialist,
aesthetic, ideological—that might be asked of under-studied areas of print
production in South Africa. It is also intended to raise questions about the
power to reconfigure the way we think about what we do with books (or with
texts of any kind that have a surface); of those points of intersections between,
on the one hand, what I have been calling book history and, on the other,
theoretical concerns with surface, depth, entanglement and futurity that have
come to be prominent in some attempts to theorise contemporary South
African society and cultural production.
In a richly suggestive essay (Chapter 8.1), Sarah Nuttall (revisiting some
of the concerns of her 2009 monograph, Entanglement) seeks to read the rise
of history-of-the-book scholarship alongside—or as involved in the theoretical
realignments testified to by—the decline of what she (following others) calls
symptomatic readings, which is to say a hermeneutics of suspicion driven chiefly
by the discourses of psychoanalysis and Marxism. “[T]here now appears
a need”, she suggests, “to think about the surface as a place from which to
read—power, personhood and contemporary culture—actively”; the surface
becomes a “generative force capable of producing effects of its own” (409, 410).
A concern with the material instantiation of text, in other words of the literal
“surface” of the book (or other printed object), is one way of reading Nuttall
literally—but there is more at stake. Turning to work by scholar of nineteenth-
century print cultures and of reading, Harvard academic Leah Price, and
drawing on a number of strategic and suggestive interventions by the likes of
Bill Brown, Anne Cheng, Jim Collins, and Jean and John Comaroff, Nuttall’s
bravura discussion suggests a number of possible “lines of flight”—to invoke
her citation of Gilles Deleuze—in terms both of matter for study, and modes of
and methodologies for engagement. Price speculates on what future scholarship
might make of the multiple uses of books—uses that approximate, but are not
necessarily congruent with reading as it has been understood in the West at
least since the eighteenth century. “[H]ow”, Price asks, might we “make sense
of the full range of operations in which books are enlisted (including but not
limited to reading)”? “[W]hat difference does it make whether we structure
that enquiry around the human subjects who perform those operations, or
38
around the inanimate objects that undergo them[?]”, she wonders (Price
2009, 123). Nuttall does not propose exactly what a return—or a turn—to
the surface might look like in South African literary critical or historiographic
terms (although she provides a number of suggestions). But her essay offers a
provocation for the kind of book-historical work being undertaken in South
Africa and on South African material to reflect on its methodologies and to
interrogate its relationship to larger critical and philosophical currents of
thought on—and along—surfaces both metaphorical and “real”.
The final—both also original—essays in this section were provided
by contributors who are or have been involved in the physical production
of books in South Africa. These chapters survey neglected areas of book
production that engage with cultural and intellectual capital in diverse ways.
Thus Bronwyn Law-Viljoen, at the time of writing both editor of the country’s
most important art magazine (Art South Africa) and co-founder and editor of
Fourthwall Books (producing high-quality art books on South African art and
artists), considers the economics of art-book publishing in South Africa in her
essay (Chapter 8.2). “The art book represents what is fast becoming an archaic
mode of publishing—slow, expensive, resistant to electronic translation,
labour intensive”, she notes. Hence, according to the logic of capitalism, “it
should have been eaten up long ago” (423). It is frequently the case, however,
that those who buy art books are often also bibliophiles—and the deluxe
edition art book also often approximates an art object. Discussing the difficult
technical and financial circumstances for the production of quality art books,
Law-Viljoen speculates that there has been a
polarisation of art book publishing in South Africa. On the one hand,

the demand for relatively inexpensive art books for schools and other
educational institutions is growing. … At the other end of the spectrum,
however, are collectible art books. These will become more expensive,
but will continue to be published to meet the demand for the beautifully
produced book-as-object (433-4).
Quite why this is, how we might think about the many roles that the art book
serves and the manner in which the book itself is frequently made to serve as
artwork are all topics that would repay future scholarly attention.
In the final essay, Elizabeth le Roux, an academic previously employed by
a university press, notes that most studies of publishing in South Africa have,
to date, “focused on the most explicit links between publishing and apartheid”,
paying less attention to “how apartheid affected publishing, but how publishing
39
INTRODUCTORY
houses actively sought either to undermine or support the government and

its policies” (437). Their focus has tended to be on independent, oppositional
publishers (like Ravan, David Philip and Skotaville) or on presses run by large
companies in support of the establishment (preeminently, Nasionale Pers).
“University presses fall in the middle—neither clearly anti-apartheid nor neatly
collaborationist” (437), Le Roux argues, and they merit closer study. This essay
offers a survey of the field and a prompt to future research (and is apt too, one
might say, given the publication of this collection by an academic press).
* * *
Scholars like Philip H. Round and Matt Cohen (both 2010) have begun to
re-energise North American book historical scholarship’s engagement with
native North American peoples’ encounters with the book as an object and
with print as technology. Cohen has suggested, too, that we need a more
nuanced and capacious account of how communication across languages
in colonial spaces marked unevenly by orality and literacy has always relied
simultaneously on multiple media. Writing about seventeenth-century New
England, he comments:
If Natives and English were both oral and inscribing peoples, then they
constituted each others’ audiences in ways scholars have only begun to
consider. What would count as evidence for a multimedia, continuous
topography of communication techniques, and what would a narrative
of it look like? What would such a narrative do to our definitions of the
boundaries between peoples—even, perhaps to operating definitions of
culture itself? (Cohen 2010, 2).
Such questions might equally energise Southern African scholarship. There is

still considerable work to be done not only in the area of early print’s circulation
in the region, but on modes of communication more broadly defined and their
mutual imbrication during and after the early colonial period.
There is also urgent work to be done on the future. South African book
cultures face complex challenges as outlined in a 2012 Department of Arts
and Culture ministerial task team report, which identified leading reasons
for the high cost of and comparatively small market for books in South
Africa: small print runs (because “the trade market is small”), competition
for qualified staff “[a]cross the value chain”, the cost of paper, the fact that
printing costs are “30%–40% cheaper” “in the East”, a “lack of bookstores
40
located outside wealthy urban areas”, poor distribution channels to encourage

the production of indigenous-language publishing, and an under-resourced
and under-utilised library system (DAC 2012, 22–23). It notes that “only 1%
of the South African population are book buyers” (DAC 2012, 15). But the
report also acknowledges the tremendous benefits of books and publishing
to the nation and state—to culture, science, education, freedom of speech,
and, not least, the economy—and seeks consultation on an ambitious plan to
stimulate growth in the sector. Any coordinated strategy bodes well for the
future of South African print cultures and should therefore be encouraged and
scrutinised. Whatever its results, it will undoubtedly provide ample material
for future book-historical research.
The essays included in this volume present themselves not as the history
of the book in South Africa—that is to say, neither as a national history of
the book, nor as a collection blind to the necessity of considering multiple
other sign systems and modes of communication in a truly expansive history
of communication in the region. The collection is certainly not exhaustive of
all possible areas of study, forms of print artefact, or, indeed, language. Rather,
these essays are chapters in a history of the book and of the history of its
study in Southern Africa. Each of these contributions recognises, through a
heterogeneity of subject and method, that an all-encompassing project would
be too restrictive for a region as varied as this is—and with such a particularly
cruel history. Rather, Print, Text and Book Cultures in South Africa presents
itself as a gathering, a space of interdisciplinary conversation intended to
make a significant intervention in a fledgling field and to suggest a number of
models that future studies might follow.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For support during the writing of this introduction and the editing of this
volume, I have incurred debts of gratitude to all of the contributors, but in
particular to Peter D. McDonald for comments on a draft of the introduction
(and, indeed, for getting me started), and Patrick Denman Flanery for
ongoing support and conversation, and for telling me when it was done.
Additionally: Rowan Roux retrieved a copy of J. M. Coetzee’s course outline
from the National English Literary Museum in Grahamstown; thanks also to
NELM for permission to cite from it. I wish also to record my gratitude to
all at Wits University Press, particularly Veronica Klipp, Julie Miller, Roshan
Cader, Melanie Pequeux and Tshepo Neito, and also to the Press’s anonymous
readers, and an efficient and accommodating copy-editor, Alex Potter.
41
INTRODUCTORY
NOTES
1 See Coetzee (1992, 391–94; 2006, 214–15); Lenta (2003).
2 Although the German Geschichte des Buchwesens, another strong influence on the
Anglo-American tradition, uses the plural. Robert Darnton (2002) also favoured
the plural.
3 For South African readers new to the field, Hofmeyr and Kriel provided a com-
pelling survey of the historiography of history of the book in their introduc-
tion to a special issue of the South African Historical Journal on “Book History in
Southern Africa” (2006, see especially 5–10).
4 Peter McDonald (1997, 105–9) offers a very useful summary of the confluence
of these different strands of book-historical work, and places McKenzie and
McGann in the context of twentieth-century scholarly editing and textual schol-
arship traditions.
5 Bourdieu’s analysis of the field and operation of distinction in relation to cultural
production generally has been enormously productive for book-historical studies,
although its widespread application has attracted critique and revision in the last
several years. For example, McDonald’s 1997 endorsement of Bourdieu’s concep-
tion of the field as a way of expanding on the usefulness of Darnton’s communi-
cation circuit had given way, by the mid-2000s, to a critique: Bourdieu’s “field”
remained “limited insofar as it addresses only one side of literature’s double chal-
lenge”, McDonald (2006, 226) wrote; “it underestimates the unpredictability of
writing, which is always capable of transforming the field by exceeding or sub-
verting its determinations”. See also Jarad Zimbler’s nuanced critique (2009),
which draws on South African literary examples in support of its arguments.
6 Much of this and the preceding paragraph draws on formulations I offered in the
introduction to a special issue of English Studies in Africa devoted to “Histories
of the Book in Southern Africa” (see Van der Vlies 2004) and in the introductory
chapter to my 2007 monograph, South African Textual Cultures.
7 For example, the three-volume University of Queensland Press A History of the
Book in Australia (including volumes edited by Wallace Kirsop on the period to
1890 [forthcoming], Martyn Lyons and John Arnold on the period 1891–1945
[2001], and Craig Munro and Robyn Sheahan-Bright on the period 1946–2005
[2006]), and the three-volume History of the Book in Canada, published by the
University of Toronto Press under the general editorship of Patricia Lockhart
Fleming and Yvan Lamonde (2004–07). The US and British national history proj-
ects are the University of North Carolina Press’s A History of the Book in America
(five volumes to 2009), and Cambridge University Press’s Cambridge History of
the Book in Britain (six volumes published to date, with a seventh, on Britain in
the twentieth century, forthcoming under the editorship of Andrew Nash, Claire
Squires and Ian Willison).
8 For important work on South Asian histories of the book (and of script and print),
see Gupta and Chakravorty (2004; 2008). Ruvani Ranasinha (2007) and Sarah
Brouillette (2007) have both written about the global fates of South Asian writers.
9 These include introductory and survey essays on the history of the book and of
script and print cultures in sub-Saharan Africa (Van der Vlies 2010), the Muslim
world (Roper 2010), the Indian subcontinent (Gupta 2010), South-east Asia
(Wieringa 2010; Igunma 2010), Australia (Morrison 2010), New Zealand (Rogers
2010), Canada (Fleming 2010) and Latin America (Roldán Vera 2010).
10 I am indebted in part to Hofmeyr and Kriel, for their useful survey (2006,
especially 10–14).
42
11 Anna H. Smith’s account of the spread of printing in South Africa (1971) has not
been bettered, although doubtless new material has been uncovered that might
contribute to a revised edition.
12 Poliva (1968, 52) writes engagingly about Nehemia Dov Hoffmann (1860–1928),
pioneer Prussian-born printer and journalist who, having worked in Berlin and
New York, arrived in Johannesburg in 1889, bringing with him the first “print-
er’s type in Yiddish characters”. Hoffman published Der Afrikaner Israelit for six
months before returning to Cape Town and becoming a peddler. He later pub-
lished a weekly called Haor, which ran for five years and, with a British Jewish
immigrant, Der Yiddisher Herald, which lasted two years (Poliva 1968, 53–54).
Mendelsohn and Shain’s The Jews in South Africa (2008) makes brief mention
of Hoffmann, and of Yiddish publishing and intellectual life in District Six (see
Mendelsohn & Shain 2008, 79, 82).
13 See Van der Vlies and Flanery (2008) further on “South African Cultural Texts and
the Global Mediascape”, the title of their special issue of Scrutiny2 on the topic.
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Wits University Press

Published edition © Wits University Press 2012

First published 2012

ISBN 978-1-86814-566-9 (Print)

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

Cover images: Death of a Typewriter and Abamfusa Lawu

Edited by Alex Potter

Abbreviations and acronyms xi

2. PRINT CULTURES AND COLONIAL PUBLIC SPHERES 49

2.2 “Spread Far and Wide over the Surface of 74

2.3 Textual Circuits and Intimate Relations: A Community 87

3. LOCAL/GLOBAL: SOUTH AFRICAN WRITING 109

3.2 “Consequential Changes”: Daphne Rooke’s Mittee in 121

3.3 Oprah’s Paton, or South Africa and the Globalisation 140

4. THREE WAYS OF LOOKING AT COETZEE 165

4.2 Under Local Eyes: The South African Publishing 195

4.3 Limber: The Flexibilities of Post-Nobel Coetzee 208

5. QUESTIONS OF THE ARCHIVE AND THE USES OF BOOKS 225

5.3 From The Origin of Language to a Language of Origin: 252

6. ORATURE, IMAGE, TEXT 285

7. IDEOLOGICAL EXIGENCIES AND THE FATES OF BOOKS 347

7.2 “Deeply Racist, Superior and Patronising”: South African 369

7.3 Begging the Questions: Producing Shakespeare for 386

8. NEW DIRECTIONS 407

8.3 The University as Publisher: Towards a History of 437

The following chapters are reproduced with permission:

of Coetzee’s Anti-pastoral” by Andrew van der Vlies, is a comprehensively

AES Army Education Services

ANDREW VAN DER VLIES

In a late chapter in Boyhood (1998 [1997]), the first of J. M. Coetzee’s

Healing” (Coetzee 1998, 117). The association forged between machines

strongly to the materiality of books—in Boyhood, John displays close attention

Readers, in fact, never confront abstract, idealized texts detached from

A text can therefore never be approached purely as only a semantic field

changes in the literal appearance of text—of each word’s relative position in

general approach, which attends to the material details of the production

not to celebrate the document at the expense of writing—in Derrida’s

McDonald expands on this in a 2006 essay, offering a description of

The play on words inventively underscored Derrida’s sustained

The redeployment of printing terminology serves in a different context to

and social conditions and political praxis”. Visser’s intervention might

States).7 Several related conferences outside metropolitan Europe and North

bought at an auction in Graaff-Reinet a press that had a long history in the

at once decentred and multiply centred”, Boehmer (2002, 6) writes in a study

intended to circulate widely. Their portability extends their reach.

In tracking the curious afterlives of African-language translations of Bunyan’s

conceptualising of individual colonial subjects as strictly and only bound

and friendship with Jeffreys. Encouraged by their correspondence, Jeffreys

else remains to be done, as it does in the field of publishing in Yiddish and

The interest evident in Hofmeyr’s and Samuelson’s essays in the complex

in these global economies. By the mid-1950s it had been dramatised, filmed,

How attentive we ought to be to the location, material conditions and

In the second essay of this Coetzee cluster, Jarad Zimbler discusses

Contributions to what has come to be known as “Book History” have

A focus on work by J. M. Coetzee is not intended to suggest that his work is

of racial conflict in Southern Africa. Her essay poses challenging questions

might be to balance an attention to that rather abstract imaginary of

Twidle attempts to answer some of these questions, specifically with attention

recently, subtly and judiciously by Ashlee Neser (2011). In this representative

An interest in legal and institutional restrictions on reading (and restrictions

in a book-history-vs-theory culture war as “historical documentalists” and

bureaucracy and provides fascinating material for an examination of the

internationally, as well as to students of textual cultures and cultural politics

The final grouping of chapters is headed “New Directions” and is intended

polarisation of art book publishing in South Africa. On the one hand,