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 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 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 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)
