WISER and Wits Press book launch: Print, Text and Book Cultures in South Africa

Please join WISER & Wits University Press

For a glass of wine and a discussion exploring the power and the politics of print, text and book cultures in South Africa

This event will mark the launch of the Wits University Press publication, Print, text and book cultures in South Africa

Ashlee Neser, literary studies researcher at WISER, will chair a discussion between Andrew van der Vlies (Queen Mary, University of London),editor of the book, and contributors Isabel Hofmeyr (Wits) and Archie Dick (UP).

This fascinating book looks at the production and consumption of books in South Africa from historical,  bibliographical, literary-critical, sociological and cultural perspectives. In twenty-two provocative essays the book show how histories are shaped, represented and developed by print and publishing cultures.

You can find an essay, from this book, written by Rita Barnard on Oprah’s Alan Paton,  extracted in Friday 7 September’s Mail & Guardian.

When:Wednesday 12 September

Drinks at 6:00 for a 6:30 p.m. start.

Where:WiSER - The Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of the Witwatersrand | 6th Floor, Richard Ward Building, East Campus,

For directions to WiSER

The Richard Ward Building is immediately adjacent to Senate House.  It is close to the Origins Centre which has public parking, especially in the late afternoons.

RSVP to 011 717 4234or Ashlee.Neser@wits.ac.za

Parking:
Visitors’parking is available in the basement of Senate House, entrance on Jorrison street

For more information about Wits University Press’ publicationsgo to http://witspress.co.za/. You can also join our mailing list from this site to be informed about future events and new publications.

About Print, text and book cultures in South Africa

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.

About the editor:

Andrew van der Vlies is Senior Lecturer in the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary, University of London, and Research Associate in the Department of English Literature at Rhodes University, Grahamstown. His areas of expertise include South African literatures and literary cultures, Anglophone postcolonial writing, and print and book histories. He is a literary critic, historian and cultural sociologist, and author of South African Textual Cultures (2010). He reviews regularly for various publications such as the Times Literary Supplement and Art South Africa.

South African Textual Cultures has been described as an important contribution to South African literary studies: “Itis… the first major study to question the very category of ‘South African literature’ and to describe the process of its construction in a sustained, engaging, theoretically astute manner.”-  Rita Barnard, University of Pennsylvania