Print, Text and Book Cultures in South Africa. Andrew van der Vlies
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 staff “[a]cross the value chain”, the cost of paper, the fact that printing costs are “30%–40% cheaper” “in the East”, a “lack of bookstores located outside wealthy urban areas”, poor distribution channels to encourage the production of indigenous-language publishing, and an under-resourced and under-utilised library system (DAC 2012, 22–23). It notes that “only 1% of the South African population are book buyers” (DAC 2012, 15). But the report also acknowledges the tremendous benefits of books and publishing to the nation and state—to culture, science, education, freedom of speech, and, not least, the economy—and seeks consultation on an ambitious plan to stimulate growth in the sector. Any coordinated strategy bodes well for the future of South African print cultures and should therefore be encouraged and scrutinised. Whatever its results, it will undoubtedly provide ample material for future book-historical research.
The essays included in this volume present themselves not as the history of the book in South Africa—that is to say, neither as a national history of the book, nor as a collection blind to the necessity of considering multiple other sign systems and modes of communication in a truly expansive history of communication in the region. The collection is certainly not exhaustive of all possible areas of study, forms of print artefact, or, indeed, language. Rather, these essays are chapters in a history of the book and of the history of its study in Southern Africa. Each of these contributions recognises, through a heterogeneity of subject and method, that an all-encompassing project would be too restrictive for a region as varied as this is—and with such a particularly cruel history. Rather, Print, Text and Book Cultures in South Africa presents itself as a gathering, a space of interdisciplinary conversation intended to make a significant intervention in a fledgling field and to suggest a number of models that future studies might follow.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For support during the writing of this introduction and the editing of this volume, I have incurred debts of gratitude to all of the contributors, but in particular to Peter D. McDonald for comments on a draft of the introduction (and, indeed, for getting me started), and Patrick Denman Flanery for ongoing support and conversation, and for telling me when it was done. Additionally: Rowan Roux retrieved a copy of J. M. Coetzee’s course outline from the National English Literary Museum in Grahamstown; thanks also to NELM for permission to cite from it. I wish also to record my gratitude to all at Wits University Press, particularly Veronica Klipp, Julie Miller, Roshan Cader, Melanie Pequeux and Tshepo Neito, and also to the Press’s anonymous readers, and an efficient and accommodating copy-editor, Alex Potter.
NOTES
1See Coetzee (1992, 391–94; 2006, 214–15); Lenta (2003).
2Although the German Geschichte des Buchwesens, another strong influence on the Anglo-American tradition, uses the plural. Robert Darnton (2002) also favoured the plural.
3For South African readers new to the field, Hofmeyr and Kriel provided a compelling survey of the historiography of history of the book in their introduction to a special issue of the South African Historical Journal on “Book History in Southern Africa” (2006, see especially 5–10).
4Peter McDonald (1997, 105–9) offers a very useful summary of the confluence of these different strands of book-historical work, and places McKenzie and McGann in the context of twentieth-century scholarly editing and textual scholarship traditions.
5Bourdieu’s analysis of the field and operation of distinction in relation to cultural production generally has been enormously productive for book-historical studies, although its widespread application has attracted critique and revision in the last several years. For example, McDonald’s 1997 endorsement of Bourdieu’s conception of the field as a way of expanding on the usefulness of Darnton’s communication circuit had given way, by the mid-2000s, to a critique: Bourdieu’s “field” remained “limited insofar as it addresses