Print, Text and Book Cultures in South Africa. Andrew van der Vlies
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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2.3
Textual Circuits and Intimate Relations: A Community of Letters across the Indian Ocean
MEG SAMUELSON
So you cannot shake off your Archives habit!! You are regularly keeping carbon copies of your letters and perhaps filing my stuff! For some future archivist to unearth and publish and start theories of the intimate relations between South Africa and