Print Culture in Southern Africa


Book Description

Print Culture in Southern Africa is concerned with the institutions and processes informing textual production, circulation and consumption in the region, over a broad historical period from the late 18th century to the present day. The book is organised around three closely related themes. Firstly, it presents original research into the formation of reading publics and the impact of reading cultures, by uncovering obscure but important reading communities and circuits of book distribution and reception. A second theme is the relationship between print and politics, with a particular focus on the networks of power: how control over the production and circulation of printed books has shaped literary and cultural development. The third theme is transnational print culture, and how the control exercised by publishers in Europe and America has shaped literature and society in southern Africa. Drawing together interdisciplinary research and diverse methodologies, the collection encompasses a range of perspectives, including literary studies, anthropology, publishing studies, the history of the book and art history, and many of the chapters are based on previously unexamined archives and collections. The volume contributes to current debates and opens up new and exciting ways of furthering the study of postcolonial literature and African book history. The chapters included in this book were originally published in the Journal of Southern African Studies.




African Print Cultures


Book Description

Broad-ranging essays on the social, political, and cultural significance of more than a century's worth of newspaper publishing practices across the African continent




AIDS, Sex, and Culture


Book Description

AIDS, Sex, and Culture is a revealing examination of the impact the AIDS epidemic in Africa has had on women, based on the author's own extensive ethnographic research. based on the author's own story growing up in South Africa looks at the impact of social conservatism in the US on AIDS prevention programs discussion of the experiences of women in areas ranging from Durban in KwaZulu Natal to rural settlements in Namibia and Botswana includes a chapter written by Sibongile Mkhize at the University of KwaZulu Natal who tells the story of her own family’s struggle with AIDS




Predicaments of Culture in South Africa


Book Description

Symptomatic of an emergent shift away from prescriptive and deterministic accounts of change in South Africa, Predicaments of culture in South Africa posits an open-ended and speculative approach to the question and agency of culture. The key question, posed by Justice Albie Sachs of the Constitutional Court of South Africa, 'what does it mean to be a South African?' is shifted from its familiar ontological and epistemological habitat, 'what is identity?', the better to embrace its ethical and political rider, 'what are identities for?', and its more pragmatic possibility, 'what can identities do?' These qualifications - Bhabha's - form the building blocks that skew and enrich existing presumptions about South Africa's history, its present moment and its future. Jamal challenges and qualifies the conflicting and contiguous drives of fatalism, positivism and relativism, which are the dominant claimants upon the South African cultural imaginary. It is this critical non-positionality that forms the distinctive trait of an inquiry which, in eschewing allegiance and closure, opens up the debate about what it means to be South African and the role of culture therein. 'In hindsight, and with the hither side of the future before us', Jamal's driving assumption is that 'world society is advancing towards yet another age of ignorance; an age beyond suspicion and irony, in which thought, whether self-critical or not, is no longer the agent of reason'. Jamal calls for an urgent reappraisal of the absence of love - of lovelessness - which he sees as the infected root of South Africa's inability to create a positively affirmative cultural imaginary.




Print, Text and Book Cultures in South Africa


Book Description

An explanation of the unique role of the book and book collecting in South Africa due to the apartheid This book explores the power of print and the politics of the book in South Africa from a range of disciplinary perspectives- historical, bibliographic, literary-critical, sociological, and cultural studies. The essays collected here, by leading international scholars, address a range of topics as varied as: the role of print cultures in contests over the nature of the colonial public sphere in the nineteenth century; orthography; iimbongi, orature and the canon; book- collecting and libraries; print and transnationalism; Indian Ocean cosmopolitanisms; books in war; how the fates of South African texts, locally and globally, have been affected by their material instantiations; photocomics and other ephemera; censorship, during and after apartheid; books about art and books as art; local academic publishing; and the challenge of 'book history' for literary and cultural criticism in contemporary South Africa.




Transnationalism in Southern African Literature


Book Description

Considering the growing interest in South African Literature at the moment, this study looks at both the Anglophone literature of South Africa and the lusophone literature of Angola and Mozambique. Stefan Helgesson suggests that the prevalence of ‘colonial’ languages such as English and Portuguese in ‘anticolonial’ or ‘postcolonial’ African Literature is primarily an effect of the print network. Helgesson aims to demystify the authority of English and Portuguese by stressing the materiality of the print medium and emphasising the strong transnational and transcontinental vectors of southern African literature after the Second World War.




The South Africa Reader


Book Description

The South Africa Reader is an extraordinarily rich guide to the history, culture, and politics of South Africa. With more than eighty absorbing selections, the Reader provides many perspectives on the country's diverse peoples, its first two decades as a democracy, and the forces that have shaped its history and continue to pose challenges to its future, particularly violence, inequality, and racial discrimination. Among the selections are folktales passed down through the centuries, statements by seventeenth-century Dutch colonists, the songs of mine workers, a widow's testimony before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and a photo essay featuring the acclaimed work of Santu Mofokeng. Cartoons, songs, and fiction are juxtaposed with iconic documents, such as "The Freedom Charter" adopted in 1955 by the African National Congress and its allies and Nelson Mandela's "Statement from the Dock" in 1964. Cacophonous voices—those of slaves and indentured workers, African chiefs and kings, presidents and revolutionaries—invite readers into ongoing debates about South Africa's past and present and what exactly it means to be South African.




Gandhi’s Printing Press


Book Description

When Gandhi as a young lawyer in South Africa began fashioning the tenets of his political philosophy, he was absorbed by a seemingly unrelated enterprise: creating a newspaper, Indian Opinion. In Gandhi’s Printing Press Isabel Hofmeyr provides an account of how this footnote to a career shaped the man who would become the world-changing Mahatma.




The Making of South Africa


Book Description

A survey of South African history from the formation of early human communities to the present. The Making of South Africa provides a detailed understanding of all the forces that have shaped South Africa to date. It represents a valuable and unique addition to the field by emphasizing African voices as well as recent developments in South Africa, including analyses on the post-transition political change, the World Cup of soccer, and public health issues. The text incorporates important new perspectives on South African geography and the spatial dimensions of segregation and apartheid. It also covers environmental studies and the dynamic literature on identities and ethnicity while highlighting how Europeans and Africans shaped the environment, politics, and the economy to develop a complex multi-ethnic nation. Learning Goals Upon completing this book readers will be able to: Understand how South Africa became the nation it is today View South African history from the point of view of Africans as well as Europeans who have settled there Assess the impact of cultural, political, social, economic, geographical, environmental, and health-related forces on South African history




Youth and Popular Culture in Africa


Book Description

"The edited collection focuses on the links between young people and African popular culture. It explores popular culture produced and consumed by young people in contemporary Africa. And by "culture," we mean all kinds of texts or representations-visual, oral, written, performative, fictional, social, and virtual-created by African youth, mostly about their lives and their immediate societies, and for themselves, but also consumed by the larger public, and shared locally and globally. We proceed from the premise that cultural texts not only function as "social facts" as Karin Barber argues, but that they double as "commentaries upon, and interpretations of, social facts. They are part of social reality, but they also take up an attitude to social reality" (2007, 04). So, the work focuses specifically on what African youth produce as popular culture, under what conditions or contexts they produce such work, how they produce those texts, why they produce them, the aesthetic dimensions of these texts as cultural artifacts, and why these textual practices matter as social facts, as interpretive acts, and as cultural symbols of the general cultural activism of young people in a rapidly changing world, a world where the global cultural economy is the prime terrain for the relentless struggles over the meanings that come to shape political-economic and social systems"--