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An experiment in reading for water, this book offers students and teachers a toolkit of methods that follow the sensory, political and agentive power of water across literary texts. The chapters in this book follow rivers, rain, streams, tunnels and sewers; connect atmospheric, surface and ground water; describe competing hydrological traditions and hydro-epistemologies. They propose new literary regions defined less by nation and area than by coastlines, river basins, monsoons, currents and hydro-cosmologies. Whether thinking along water courses, below the water line, or through the fall of precipitation, Reading for Water moves laterally, vertically and contrapuntally between different water-worlds and hydro-imaginaries. Addressing southern African and Caribbean texts, the collection draws on a range of elementally inclined literary approaches: critical oceanic studies, new materialisms, coastal and hydrocritical approaches, hydrocolonialism, black hydropoetics and atmospheric methods. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Interventions.
Draws together reflective and analytical essays by renowned intellectuals from around the world who critically engage with the work of one of the global South s leading scholars of African print cultures and the oceanic humanities, Isabel Hofmeyr.
In Dockside Reading Isabel Hofmeyr traces the relationships among print culture, colonialism, and the ocean through the institution of the British colonial Custom House. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, dockside customs officials would leaf through publications looking for obscenity, politically objectionable materials, or reprints of British copyrighted works, often dumping these condemned goods into the water. These practices, echoing other colonial imaginaries of the ocean as a space for erasing incriminating evidence of the violence of empire, informed later censorship regimes under apartheid in South Africa. By tracking printed matter from ship to shore, Hofmeyr shows how literary institutions like copyright and censorship were shaped by colonial control of coastal waters. Set in the environmental context of the colonial port city, Dockside Reading explores how imperialism colonizes water. Hofmeyr examines this theme through the concept of hydrocolonialism, which puts together land and sea, empire and environment.
South Africa and India constitute two key nodes in the global south and have inspired new modes of non-Western transnational history. Themes include anti-imperial movements; Gandhian ideas; comparisons of race and caste; Afro-Asian ideals; Indian Ocean public spheres. This volume extends these debates into the cultural and linguistic terrain. The book combines the methods of Indian Ocean studies and Comparative Cultural Studies, both committed to moving beyond the nation state. Case studies explore classics and concomitant ideas of civilisation, colonial linguistics and the history of languages, and theatre. Topics include the use of classics by colonisers and the colonised in British India and South Africa differences between South African Indian English and Indian English how the Linguistic Survey of India conflicted with colonial and nationalist mappings of India and its references to African languages the rise of ‘Hinglish’ in contemporary India a South African play dealing with African-Indian interactions. This bookw as published as a special issue of African Studies.
This set of essays analyses the work of Isabel Hofmeyr, globally recognised as one of South Africa's foremost literary and Indian Ocean scholars. The essays elucidate Hofmeyr's path-breaking studies of transnational histories of the book, African print cultures, and cultural circulations in the Indian Ocean world.
This work is a biography of the Afrikaner people by historian and journalist Herman Giliomee, one of the earliest and staunchest Afrikaner opponents of apartheid. Weaving together life stories and historical interpretation, he creates a narrative history of the Afrikaners from their beginnings with the colonisation of the Cape of Good Hope by the Dutch East India Company to the dismantling of apartheid and beyond.
In 2022 Wits University Press marked its centenary, making it the oldest, most established university press in sub-Saharan Africa. While in part modelled on scholarly publishers from the global North, it has had to contend with the constraints of working under global South conditions: marginalisation within the university, budgetary limitations, small local markets, unequal access to international sales channels, and the privileging of English language publishing over indigenous languages. This volume explores what the Press has achieved, and what its modes of reinvention might look like. In widening and deepening our understanding of the Press as an example of a global South scholarly publi...
The title of Beyond the Line refers to the imaginary "Line" drawn between North and South, a division established by the Peace Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis in 1559. This is an early modern time and Eurocentric construction, according to which the southern oceanic world has long been taken as symbol of expansionist philosophies and practices. An obvious motivation for changing this "Line" division is the growing influence of the "Global South" in the contemporary economic and political setting. However, another motivation for changing opinions in regard to the "Line" is equally important. We observe an emergent consciousness of the pivotal role of the oceanic world for human life. This require...
A comprehensive introduction to Bunyan's life and works, examining their place in the broader context of seventeenth-century history and literature.
Pedro Feitoza traces the history of Protestantism in Brazil through an analysis of the production and circulation of evangelical texts. Examining a wide range of periodicals, tracts, correspondence, and other archival records and delving into the ideology of religious thinkers and evangelists of the time, Feitoza considers how Protestant veneration of the written word led to a complex infrastructure for the distribution of religious texts and the fostering of literacy in Brazil in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.