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 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 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 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
