Reading From the South : African Print Cultures and Oceanic Turns in Isabel Hofmeyr’s Work | 6 September | 4pm @WISEROnline

WiSER and Wits University Press warmly invite you to the online book launch of

Reading from the South
African Print Cultures and Oceanic Turns in Isabel Hofmeyr’s Work

Edited by Charne Lavery & Sarah Nuttall

Isabel Hofmeyr is one of the world’s leading scholars on African print cultures, postcolonial literary histories, Indian Ocean studies and the oceanic humanities. For four decades and counting, her work has produced profound conceptual innovations from the global South and for the world at large. The essays gathered in Reading from the South are written in a blend of intellectual and personal modes, and mostly by scholars of Indian and African descent. Via their engagement with Hofmeyr’s path-breaking work, the essays in turn elaborate and contribute to studies of print culture as well as critical oceanic studies, consolidating their findings from the point of view of global South historical contexts and textual practices.

The collection focuses on Hofmeyr’s life and work, her education and early career, her deep rootedness in place, and her political, creative and institution-building activities. The book captures Hofmeyr’s innovative and original scholarship through published works that address a range of topics: orality and literacy, feminist literary criticism, transnational histories of the book, South–South cultural connections, and the phenomenology of reading within the Indian Ocean world and, indeed, around the globe. After reading the collection as a whole, scholars in the field will have a much deeper appreciation of Hofmyer’s work and the formidable contribution she has made to the study of African print cultures and oceanic humanities at large.

This wide range of analytical and reflective pieces on the work of the inimitable Isabel Hofmeyr affords us the unalloyed pleasure of discovering that we have not received Hofmeyr’s work as individuals but that we are part of a large and dedicated international community of celebration. It is a wondrous gift. — Ato Quayson, Jean G. and Morris M. Doyle Professor in Interdisciplinary Studies and Professor of English, Stanford University, California

An immersive intellectual portrait of a scholar whose capacious itineraries model what it means to widen the horizons of our scholarly practice. A rewarding read. — Grace A. Musila, Associate Professor, Department of African Literature, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg

The contributors to Reading from the South depict the vast complexity of Africa in the Indian Ocean world, presenting evidence and arguments that render the continent an open space of mobility on land and sea. A very satisfying intellectual odyssey, and a wonderful tribute to Isabel Hofmeyr. — Rila Mukherjee, author of India in the Indian Ocean World: From the Earliest Times to 1800 CE

The launch will feature an introduction by the editors, short sharp commentaries from a range of contributors to the book, and a response from Isabel Hofmeyr.

 

September 6 @WISEROnline,
4pm (Johannesburg time)
Register here

 

About the Editors
Charne Lavery is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Pretoria and Co-director of the Oceanic Humanities for the Global South project based at WISER, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.
Sarah Nuttall is Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at WISER at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.