Print, Text and Book Cultures in South Africa. Andrew van der Vlies

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) position” (399). The investment in “Shakespeare” made by Anglophone South African society can be read variously in the manner in which educational editions of Shakespeare plays have been produced and promoted in South Africa. To explore how this works, Distiller examines versions of Macbeth in a number of editions—the Shakespeare Schools Text Project published by Macmillan; Maskew Miller Longman’s Active Shakespeare series; Walter Saunders et al.’s Introducing Shakespeare abridgements (subsequently the “Shakespeare 2000” editions that offered parallel modernised and “original” texts); and the Wits Schools Shakespeare Macbeth, published by Nasou Via Afrika in 2007—in order to pose this question: “How much does Shakespeare really matter in post-apartheid South African cultures if an outdated version is in circulation within a society that seems to be very busily working through its complex definitions of ‘culture’ none the worse (if none the better) for it?” (402). A polemical account by a leading scholar of contemporary South African cultural formations and of Shakespeare and Early Modern studies in post-colonial contexts, this essay will be of interest to Shakespeare scholars internationally, as well as to students of textual cultures and cultural politics in post-colonial contexts.

      * * *

      The final grouping of chapters is headed “New Directions” and is intended to suggest the kinds of questions—theoretical, economic, cultural materialist, aesthetic, ideological—that might be asked of under-studied areas of print production in South Africa. It is also intended to raise questions about the power to reconfigure the way we think about what we do with books (or with texts of any kind that have a surface); of those points of intersections between, on the one hand, what I have been calling book history and, on the other, theoretical concerns with surface, depth, entanglement and futurity that have come to be prominent in some attempts to theorise contemporary South African society and cultural production.

      In a richly suggestive essay (Chapter 8.1), Sarah Nuttall (revisiting some of the concerns of her 2009 monograph, Entanglement) seeks to read the rise of history-of-the-book scholarship alongside—or as involved in the theoretical realignments testified to by—the decline of what she (following others) calls symptomatic readings, which is to say a hermeneutics of suspicion driven chiefly by the discourses of psychoanalysis and Marxism. “[T]here now appears a need”, she suggests, “to think about the surface as a place from which to read—power, personhood and contemporary culture—actively”; the surface becomes a “generative force capable of producing effects of its own” (409, 410). A concern with the material instantiation of text, in other words of the literal “surface” of the book (or other printed object), is one way of reading Nuttall literally—but there is more at stake. Turning to work by scholar of nineteenth-century print cultures and of reading, Harvard academic Leah Price, and drawing on a number of strategic and suggestive interventions by the likes of Bill Brown, Anne Cheng, Jim Collins, and Jean and John Comaroff, Nuttall’s bravura discussion suggests a number of possible “lines of flight”—to invoke her citation of Gilles Deleuze—in terms both of matter for study, and modes of and methodologies for engagement. Price speculates on what future scholarship might make of the multiple uses of books—uses that approximate, but are not necessarily congruent with reading as it has been understood in the West at least since the eighteenth century. “[H]ow”, Price asks, might we “make sense of the full range of operations in which books are enlisted (including but not limited to reading)”? “[W]hat difference does it make whether we structure that enquiry around the human subjects who perform those operations, or around the inanimate objects that undergo them[?]”, she wonders (Price 2009, 123). Nuttall does not propose exactly what a return—or a turn—to the surface might look like in South African literary critical or historiographic