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 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 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; 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, was
