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order to pose this question: “How much does Shakespeare really matter in post-apartheid South African cultures if an outdated version is in circulation within a society that seems to be very busily working through its complex definitions of ‘culture’ none the worse (if none the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 internationally, as well as to students of textual cultures and cultural politics in post-colonial contexts.
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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 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 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).
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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
