role as part of a transnational reading and textual network. In this monthly iteration of how texts could be directed across the world and have powerful influences on all they encountered, the CTLBA played its part in laying the ground work for the emergence of the idea of a transnational Protestant reading public.
II
What deductions might we draw from the workings of the CTLBA? What light might this case study throw on international and national developments in the field? To answer this question, a brief overview of trends in the transnational history of the book becomes necessary. As I indicated above, most book history is national in its orientation. At the same time, there is a sizeable body of scholarship on the movement of books across boundaries. This scholarship generally takes the form of analysing patterns of book exports—mainly from England to colonial North America (Barber 1976; 1982; Bell, Bennett & Bevan 2000; Bell 2000; McDougall 2004)—and/or examining the creation of national markets in a colonial economy, which is the approach taken, for example, by the Australian History of the Book project (Lyons & Arnold 2001). This work is, of course, extremely important, but tends generally to rely on a model of “centre” and “periphery”: books are produced in the “centre” and consumed in the periphery, or book-making technology is produced in the “centre” and exported to the “periphery”.
The model of “centre” and “periphery” or “metropole” and “colony” in which influences from the former flow outwards to the latter has been under fire for some time. The critiques of this older model have emanated from revisionist understandings in which the imperial and post-imperial world is understood as an intellectually integrated zone (Prakash 1995; Cooper & Stoler 1997; Van der Veer 2001). Forms of influence consequently flow in more than one direction and developments are shaped in multiple sites, not only “centre” and “periphery”.
One recent study that avoids the pitfalls of “centre” and “periphery” in favour of a more integrated framework is Priya Joshi’s In Another Country: Colonialism, Culture, and the English Novel in India (2002). Through placing an analysis of reading patterns in India alongside a history of the Macmillan publishing company, she demonstrates how popular reading tastes in India help to determine the shape and content of metropolitan publishing profiles. Readers in colonial markets are understood as intellectual players in a broader transnational arena rather than being imagined as mere consumers. The case study of the CTLBA offered here seeks to illustrate a similar process. The CTLBA is not just a minor grouping on the periphery whose work has little impact beyond Cape Town. Instead, the group needs to be understood as agents whose reading and textual practices play a role in bringing a transnational Protestant arena into being.
Yet is such an approach useful in the emerging field of book history in South Africa? A transnational approach is necessarily ambitious, since it entails a grasp of intellectual developments in several parts of the world. Book history in South Africa is currently in its infancy and such work as does exist is largely national in orientation. A further problem is that much material pertaining to book studies in South Africa is dominated by a presentistic book development paradigm. There is consequently a lot of material on development-related areas like literacy, libraries and educational publishing. Yet there is little curiosity about the histories of textual practices, about how print culture has operated in the past and how, for example, distinctive forms of textual practice have emerged as book-making technology has been “baptised” in African intellectual and spiritual traditions.1
Book history in South Africa consequently faces two challenges: it needs to live up to its name and become book history. It also needs to develop a stronger transnational awareness so that the work done in South Africa can demonstrate its importance to scholarship elsewhere. Without such a development, book history in this country runs the risk of becoming an antiquarian endeavour.
NOTES
1In situations of early encounter between mission and convert, where literacy is generally acquired outside formal institutions, the phenomenon of “miraculous literacy”—where Africans acquire the ability to read (and sometimes to write) through divine intervention—is not uncommon (Hofmeyr 2001; Hodgson 1980). In such conceptualisations, the idea of the printed text is radically reinterpreted: it becomes an object that circulates between heaven and earth, and an object that “speaks” through immersion in oral traditions.
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