Bleek

Wilhelm H. I. Bleek first came to Natal in 1854 with Bishop J. W. Colenso's party to assist with translation of the English bible into Zulu.  A young Prussian linguist, he was the founder of southern African linguistics.  Bleek's doctoral dissertation at the University Bonn, submitted in 1851 as De Nominum Generibus Linguarum Africae Australis, Copticae, Semiticarum Aliarumque Sexualium was written in Latin, and based on a few texts that he had been able to obtain from missionaries in the Cape and from European libraries. This dissertation dealt with the problem of how the more abstract grammatical 'gender' classes of the African languages might be related to ‘sexual’ gender categories (masculine and feminine) in European languages.  Although broadly comparative, it also attempted to provide the first grammars of Nama and Xhosa.  Bleek’s earliest work was the first philosophical and comparative approach to African languages in relation to cultural categories: what we would today call a socio-linguistics.  Indeed, his work on gender as both a grammatical and cultural category anticipated by at least a century similar work by linguists and feminists.  This work formed the basis for his later Grammar of South African Languages published in 1863, a work which formed the basis for all subsequent grammars of Bantu languages and still forms the basis on which all of these languages are described and taught today.  By coining the term ‘Bantu’ as the universal label for a large family related languages and cultures, he paved the way for ideas of pan-African identities and histories, comparative studies in ethnology and linguistics, and helped to make later ethnographic studies possible

South African commercial and production pottery is a
highly neglected field of research. In this article I focus on
reproductions of San rock paintings on domestic crockery
produced by Grahamstown Pottery’s Drostdy Ware
in the 1950s. At first glance, Drostdy’s Bushman wares
appear to resemble clichéd copies of Helen Tongue’s
(1909) reproductions. It is argued that Drostdy’s Bushman
wares offer a partial reflection into the complex,
evolving and frequently contradictory public sentiment
of the 1950s regarding the provenance of San rock art;
its raison d’etre; its public profile in the media, literature,
popular fiction, scientific literature, the arts, festivals
and exhibitions. This article contends that Drostdy’s
Bushman wares both espoused and contested contemporary
realities. The interstitial agency of Drostdy’s
Bushman wares was asserted via the triangulation of
textual markings on their bases; iconography and design;
and compounded by their relative quantitative “weight”.
These wares challenge the political neutrality or complicity
of much contemporary South African art and craft
production.

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)

The ethnographic monograph has its roots in two traditions. While its format and rhetoric are strongly influenced by the natural science monograph, its content derives largely from genres of travelogue and missionary letters and bulletins. In the period 1850-1900, ethnographic writing was addressed to two audiences, but by the turn of the century it had been 'captured' by theoretical social scientists and became the appropriate and legitimate domain of the new academic discipline of anthropology. Academic anthropology could not claim small-scale societies, but could claim the ethnographic description of small-scale societies, as its professional domain.