Andrew van der Vlies

The first collection of nonfiction critical writings by one of the leading literary figures of post-apartheid South Africa The most significant nonfiction writings of Zoë Wicomb, one of South Africa's leading authors and intellectuals, are collected here for the first time in a single volume. This compilation features essays on the works of such prominent South African writers as Bessie Head, Nadine Gordimer, Njabulo Ndebele, and J. M. Coetzee, as well as on a wide range of cultural and political topics, including gender politics, sexuality, race, identity, nationalism, and visual art. Also presented here are a reflection on Nelson Mandela and a revealing interview with Wicomb. In these essays, written between 1990 and 2013, Wicomb offers insights into her nation's history, politics, and people. In a world in which nationalist rhetoric is on the rise and right-wing populist movements are the declared enemies of diversity and pluralism, her essays speak powerfully to a host of current international issues.

Bringing together leading and emerging scholars, this book asks the question: how has contemporary South African literature grappled with ideas of time and history during the political transition away from apartheid?

Reading the work of major South African writers such as J.M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer and Ivan Vladislavic as well as contemporary crime fiction, South African Writing in Transition explores how concerns about time and temporality have shaped literary form across the country's literary culture. Establishing new connections between leading literary voices and lesser known works, the book explores themes of truth and reconciliation, disappointment and betrayal.

Present Imperfect asks how South African writers have responded to the end of apartheid, to the hopes that attended the birth of the 'new' nation in 1994, and to the inevitable disappointments that have followed. The first full-length study of affect in South Africa's literature, it understands 'disappointment' both as a description of bad feeling and as naming a missed appointment with all that was promised by the anti-colonial and anti-apartheid Struggle (a dis-appointment). Attending to contemporary writers' treatment of temporality, genre, and form, it considers a range of negative feelings that are also experiences of temporal disjuncture-including stasis, impasse, boredom, disaffection, and nostalgia. Present Imperfect offers close readings of work by a range of writers - some known to international Anglophone readers including J.M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Ivan Vladislavic, and Zoë Wicomb, some slightly less well-known including Afrikaans-language novelists Marlene van Niekerk and Ingrid Winterbach, and others from a new generation including Songeziwe Mahlangu and Masande Ntshanga.

It addresses key questions in South African studies about the evolving character of the historical period in which the country now finds itself. It is also alert to wider critical and theoretical conversations, looking outward to make a case for the place of South African writing in global conversations, and mobilizing readings of writing marked in various ways as 'South African' in order to complicate the contours of World Literature as category, discipline, and pedagogy. It is thus also a book about the discontents of neoliberalism, the political energies of reading, and the fates of literature in our troubled present.

The arrival of printing in South Africa occasioned a great many social changes: it facilitated governance, participated in the production and propagation of anthropological and scientific ‘knowledge’ about the place and its peoples, required the development of orthographies for African languages, and served the spread of western education and of Christianity—with all of its attendant complex and ambiguous consequences. Print, Text & Book Cultures in South Africa 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.

This volume is the most comprehensive and representative introduction to the study of print and of the book in South Africa, showcasing the best of current research (while problematising the nature of ‘the book’, and exploring the difficult conditions for print in the country). It takes the measure of the impact of book-historical and related fields of study on South African scholarship, while pointing the way towards avenues for future research.

Authors (in order of appearance): Leon de Kock, Isabel Hofmeyr, Meg Samuelson, John Gouws, Lucy Graham, Rita Barnard, Andrew van der Vlies, Jarad Zimbler, Patrick Flanery, Lize Kriel, Archie Dick, Hedley Twidle, Jeff Opland, Deborah Seddon, Lily Saint, Peter McDonald, Margriet van der Waal, Natasha Distiller, Sarah Nuttall, Bronwyn Law-Viljoen, Beth Le Roux.

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Print, Text and Book Cultures in South Africa is a field-defining contribution to the country’s literary scholarship. Andrew van der Vlies’s introductory essay maps the conceptual terrain in a systematic and engaging way, illustrating its relevance to South Africa’s literary and cultural history. The essays that follow demonstrate the archival richness and liveliness of the field, while opening doors to future research. Beyond South Africa, the book will be exemplary in showing how book histories develop under postcolonial conditions.
-- David Attwell, author of J.M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing (1993) and Rewriting Modernity: Studies in Black South African Literary History (2005), and co-editor of The Cambridge History of South African Literature (2012)

South African literary criticism has been rejuvenated by an emphasis on the materiality of book production and circulation, and the historical embedding of those institutions and practices that turned texts into ‘works’ considered worthy of our attention. This elegantly framed collection of readable, provocative essays examines the relations between the production and consumption of books to present a rich social history of South African print cultures. It is indispensible reading for anyone seeking to come to terms with the processes and practices, both national and transnational, that have fashioned this country’s literature and the ways in which it is read and understood.
-- Michael Titlestad, University of the Witwatersrand

This is an extraordinarily rewarding book. Its essays by key scholars and book-trade practitioners attend to the rich complexity of the varied trajectories and meanings of South African print culture. The introduction by Andrew van der Vlies offers a tour de force statement of the complex interplay between South African social, political, and economic realities and book history methodologies; each piece that follows charts a compelling course through the shifting contexts for South African print, whether to bring those contexts to bear on literary interpretation, or to highlight the interdependence of print and history.
-- Sarah Brouillette, author of Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace (2007)

Wide-ranging and sophisticated, this collection of essays does not simply add more case studies to the book-historical canon but contributes new models to the debate.
-- Leah Price, Harvard University

Thought provoking, wide ranging in its subject material, and dynamically edited, this collection marks a turning point in the study of book cultures in South Africa. These essays, exemplars of recently published work in the field, draw attention to the rich, interdisciplinary seams of material uncovered by key exponents of South African print culture history. The work as a whole demonstrates how one can engage with the confluence of text, people, history, culture, and print technology in South African contexts. It will prove one of the first ports of call for anyone wishing to undertake further journeys in this subject area in the future.
-- David Finkelstein, co-editor of The Book History Reader (2001) and The Edinburgh History of the Book in Scotland (vol. 4, 2007), and co-author of An Introduction to Book History (2005)

""This introduction offers a guide to the historical contexts and critical ideas necessary for an informed and rewarding engagement with one of the most significant novels of the last quarter century. Offering an overview of the author’s career, informed discussion of the novel’s setting and references, it considers such issues as the representation of race, gender, the land, and animals, and its concern with language, power, music, confession, and allegory, providing discussion of the novel’s critical and popular reception, a comprehensive guide to further reading, and questions for discussion.

From the reviews:

‘Lively, succinct, and readable, Andrew van der Vlies’s handbook of key themes, contexts, and intertexts is the best reader’s guide to J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace on the market.’ Endorsement from Mark Sanders, New York University.

‘Andrew van der Vlies, in J. M. Coetzee’s “Disgrace”, testifies to the amount of intellectual activity at work in this seemingly slight novel […]. His detailed account of central themes, alongside a narrative of Disgrace’s historical context and reception, will bolster the thinking of any casual reader. He pays the text the attention it deserves […]’. Stephen Abell, ‘J. M. Coetzee and the limits of sympathy’, Times Literary Supplement 25 February 2011: 2.

‘[V]an der Vlies provides a very fine introduction to Disgrace in this volume. Readers will find especially insightful his treatment of Coetzee’s preoccupation with alterity, and the responsibility, both ethical and aesthetic, that such otherness exacts.’ Mike Marais, Review of J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace & J.M. Coetzee’s Austerities, Research in African Literatures 42.4 (2011): 135-37; 135.""

"This monograph considers the construction of the idea of an anglophone ‘South African’ literature through a series of case studies of the publication and reception histories of authors from Olive Schreiner, William Plomer, Roy Campbell and Alan Paton, to Alex La Guma, J.M. Coetzee, and Zakes Mda.

From the reviews:

"This is a pathbreaking book. [....] This interdisciplinary research establishes van der Vlies as a first rate literary critic, historian and cultural sociologist"
Laura Chrisman, SHARP News (August 2009)

"'South African Textual Cultures' is a significant addition to the field of postcolonial studies, and at the same time is informative and enabling. Heavily engaged with the political machinations of these developments and freighted with rigorous archival evidence, van der Vlies’ study is a model of scholarly rigour and will, one hopes, beget similar projects in other postcolonial contexts"
Eóin Flannery, Journal of Southern African Studies (June 2009)

"'South African Textual Cultures' is exemplary. Grounded in empirical research..., it is a thorough application of book history’s core methodologies. It also provides extensive evidence for one of its chief pieties: never stable, the meaning and value of texts shift with diverse readerships’ invested responses to particular circumstances. ... Though it presents itself as partial accounts of moments within a multivalent transnational history, readers of this study will come away with a sense of the overarching political horizons that have framed the region’s literary production, from Olive Schreiner’s 'The Story of an African Farm' (1883) to the post-apartheid novels of Zakes Mda"
Sarah Brouillette, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies (November 2008)

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This article offers a close reading of Zoë Wicomb's 2006 novel, Playing in the Light, arguing that it continues a project, evident throughout Wicomb's oeuvre, of exploring the ethics of narrative in the context of the legacies of colonial discursive formations, and of testing the responsibilities of fiction in the particular historical circumstances of post-apartheid South Africa. The essay argues that Wicomb's novel points to possibilities for narrative agency that actively plays host to the narratives of others. Using Jacques Derrida's suggestion that a consideration of the virtual archive, that which has been suppressed from the official record, is crucial to the post-apartheid nation, the article explores the idea of the archive both as space of engagement and as metaphor to explore apartheid experience and the construction of race.

The editors of this volume, by way of introducing the collective concerns of its constituent essays, engage with possible reasons for, and implications of, the continuing affective powers of literary, cinematic, dramatic, musical, and plastic art “texts” from and about South Africa for global audiences. In Part I, Patrick Denman Flanery offers a personal reflection on his earliest encounters with “South African” “cultural texts” (or their adaptations) in an American context, suggesting the nature of such texts’ emotional and aesthetic relevance to white liberal audiences in particular. In Part II, Andrew van der Vlies offers broader theoretical analyses of the idea of global mediascapes, relating this to his own ongoing encounters with South African cultural and literary material. In Part III, the editors discuss the relevance of the essays which follow to the issue's themes and concerns.

... By Nadine Gordimer, John Dugard, Richard Smith et al. Emmarentia : Taurus , 1980 . 67 – 73 . View all references 67). ... Van der Vlies , Andrew . South African Textual Cultures: White, Black, Read All Over . Manchester : Manchester UP , 2007 . View all references. ...

In a wide-ranging and suggestive assessment of the implications of Oprah Winfrey's selection of Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country (1948) as the second book—after Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath—in Oprah's revamped on-air and online Book Club in ...

... land must work for Africa, not South Africa, and Letsitsi replies that he speaks as he sings, `for we sing Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika ... Rayner's The Enemy Below (London, 1956), Charlotte Paul's Minding Our Own Business (London, 1956) and Edna Ferber's Giant (London, 1952), the film ...

Bongani Ndodana-Breen, born in Queenstown in the Eastern Cape in 1975, was educated at St Andrew's College in Grahamstown, Rhodes University (where he studied Music as an undergraduate), and the University of Stellenbosch (where he studied composition). He started composing in his late teens, and by 1998, aged only twenty-one, had won a Standard Bank Young Artist of the Year Award for Music. Acclaimed early work included the chamber opera Themba and Seliba (libretto by Gwyneth Lloyd; premiered in 1996), Uhambo – the pilgrimage, an opera-oratorio based on South African poet Guy Butler's long poem, Pilgrimage to Dias Cross, performed at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown in 1998 (Ndodana-Breen was Standard Bank Young Artist of the Year in the same year), and several orchestral and chamber works. He migrated to North America in 1997, and is currently Artistic Director of the Toronto-based contemporary music ensemble, MusicaNoir, which he co-founded in 2000, and which has developed a reputation for multimedia projects engaging with issues of cultural diversity and identity, with an emphasis on exploring cultural expressions of the African diaspora. For a comparatively young composer – thirty-two at the time of this interview – Ndodana-Breen has produced a large body of richly suggestive work, and worked with or had his work performed by an impressive selection of leading orchestras and ensembles – including the Belgian National Orchestra, Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra, Symphony Nova Scotia, Natal Philharmonic, New York City's Vox Vocal Ensemble, Cape Town City Ballet, and Chicago's Cube Ensemble.

As South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was in the midst of conducting Human Rights Violation hearings across the country in 1997, leading intellectual and writer Njabulo Ndebele suggested in an essay in Negotiating the Past (1998)–one of the first ...