Transnational Print Cultures: Books, -scapes, and the Textual Atlantic

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Notes

¹ Rita Barnard, “Oprah's Paton.” The essay was reprinted with the same title in Safundi 23 (July 2006), http://www.safundi.com/issues/23/barnard.asp (accessed 29 January 2007). References are to the first, print version.

² Colleran, “South African Theatre in the United States.” See also Kruger, “Apartheid on Display,” and Barnard's chapter on Athol Fugard, “A Man's Scenery.”

³ Colleran argues, for example, that “when a different kind of political capital was needed than that bought by eliding the half-shared histories of South African and American race relations, the response to apartheid could be usefully reconfigured to signify difference and distance”; see Colleran, “South African theatre in the United States,” 221.

⁴ The phrase is Barnard's; see Barnard, “Oprah's Paton,” 94, 98. Arjun Appadurai's sense of a range of -scapes (he describes mediascapes, ethnoscapes, technoscapes, finanscapes, and ideoscapes) describing the global reality of “historically situated imaginations” in an age characterised by movement, displacement, and diaspora, informs Barnard's analysis (Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” 329). See also Barnard, “An Introduction to Issue 23,” available at http://www.safundi.com/issues/23/intro.asp (accessed 29 January 2007). For a discussion of the suggestiveness of Appadurai's theorization of this traffic in ideas, ideologies, and textualities to studies of print cultures, see Newell, West African Literatures,” 10–20.

⁵ Ellison, “The Art of Fiction: An Interview,” 223-4. For my discussion of Paton's novel's reception in the United States, Britain, and South Africa, and of its complex textual and performance history, see van der Vlies, South African Textual Cultures, chapter 4; and “ ‘Local’ Writing, ‘Global’ Reading, and the Demands of the ‘Canon,’ ” 25.

⁶ Alexander, Alan Paton: A Biography, 220–23.

⁷ Arac, Huckleberry Finn as Idol and Target, 128. See Trilling, The Liberal Imagination, 104–17.

⁸ See, for example, a posting by “Ingrid” on the South African LitNet (literary and cultural) discussion site on 25 January 2007, entitled “Cry my Beloved Country: Suid-Afrika se Landsburgers Pleit om Hulp!” [“South Africa's citizens plead for help!”]. This responded to a string of entries in which Afrikaans-speaking readers debated popular Afrikaans singer Bok van Blerk's contentious song, “De la Rey,” which suggested the need for a new “ethnic” Afrikaans leader, a new General De la Rey (a renowned Boer leader during the Anglo-Boer War). “Ingrid” instead called on President Mbeki to act on violent crime, and cited a Scottburgh (KwaZulu-Natal) magistrate's courtroom quotation from Paton's novel Cry, the Beloved Country (“Have no doubt it is fear in the land” etc., the opening of chapter 12): http://litnet.co.za/cgi-bin/giga.cgi?cmd = cause_dir_news_item&cause_id = 1270&news_id = 8982 (accessed March 2007).

⁹ Radway, A Feeling for Books, 279. See Alexander, Alan Paton, 230.

¹⁰ See Sharp, Condensing the Cold War.

¹¹ This first volume went on to sell half a million copies by 1957, and established the series as an enduring and influential part of the Reader's Digest project. See Canning, American Dreamers, 107–8.

¹² For more detailed discussion, see Van der Vlies, “ ‘Local’ Writing,” 24–25, and South African Textual Cultures, chapter 4, further.

¹³ Van der Vlies, “ ‘Local’ Writing” contrasts the Reader's Digest abridgement, and its implications, with the novel's abridgement and serialization in The African Drum, later Drum, in South Africa, in 1951.

¹⁴ See van der Vlies, “ ‘Local’ Writing,” 32. On the materiality of national literary mythologies, see Gross, “Books, Nationalism, and History.”

¹⁵ Shillingsburg, Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age, 42–43, 44.

¹⁶ Ibid., 44.

¹⁷ McGann, The Beauty of Inflections, 9. See Chartier, Forms and Meanings and The Culture of Print; McKenzie, The Panizzi Lectures; Darnton, The Kiss of Lamourette (especially the essay “What Is the History of Books?”); McGann, Beauty of Inflections and The Textual Condition. Other notable theorists and commentators include Hall, Cultures of Print and Johns, The Nature of the Book. Finkelstein and McCleery's anthology of seminal pieces, The Book History Reader, is eminently useful. French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has had a marked influence on some corners of the field—specifically his The Field of Cultural Production.

¹⁸ Chrisman, Postcolonial Contravention, 1.

¹⁹ See, for example, Slemon and Tiffin, “Introduction,” x.

²⁰ Young, Colonial Desire, 163.

²¹ McDonald, “Modernist Publishing,” 231–32. McDonald, a South African-born academic at Oxford currently producing a book on the institutions of South African literature under apartheid, has offered some of the most theoretically nuanced assessments of the energies of book-historical scholarship of recent years. For his more recent assessment of the field, see McDonald, “Ideas of the Book and Histories of Literature,” 214–28.

²² For a survey of the field, which includes an assessment of the current “needs” of South African (and so, conceivably, South African–United States “comparative”) book-historical scholarship, see Hofmeyr Lize Kriel, “Book History in Southern Africa.” See also van der Vlies, “Introduction.”

²³ Chrisman, “Journeying to Death” and Crossings. Revised versions are included in Chrisman's Postcolonial Contraventions, 73–88; see 73. See Gilroy, The Black Atlantic.

²⁴ Chrisman, Postcolonial Contraventions, 89. The relevant chapter (89–106) appeared first in different form as “Rethinking Black Atlanticism.” Chrisman quotes Gilroy's assertion that black nationalism was “antithetical to the rhizomorphic, fractal structure of the transcultural, international formation of the black Atlantic”; Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 3.

²⁵ Zakes Mda and Damon Galgut, “Damon Galgut in conversation with Zakes Mda” (19 July 2005), LitNet, http://www.oulitnet.co.za/chain/damon_galgut_vs_zakes_mda.asp.

²⁶ Julie Wark, “Interview with Zakes Mda” (15–16 October 2004), www.zakesmda.com/pages/Interview_Wark.html (accessed 3 March 2007).

²⁷ Madison Smartt Bell, “Mammals in Love,” Review of The Whale Caller by Zakes Mda, New York Times, January 8, 2006.

²⁸ Rush, “Apocalypse When?”

²⁹ For more, see van der Vlies, South African Textual Cultures, chapter 7.

³⁰ Zakes Mda, The Heart of Redness, cover. See van der Vlies, South African Textual Cultures, chapter 7, further.

³¹ My emphasis. The error has been repeated on the dust-jacket of the 2005 British Penguin hardcover edition of The Whale Caller, which uses the same construction. See Mda, The Whale Caller, dust-jacket(s).

³² “Damon Galgut in conversation with Zakes Mda.” The ABSA/LitNet Chain Interview, LitNet, 19 July 2005, http://www.oulitnet.co.za/chain/damon_galgut_vs_zakes_mda.asp (accessed January 29, 2007); Zakes Mda, in discussion with the author, April 2006.

³³ Barnard, “Oprah's Paton,” 99.

³⁴ English, The Economy of Prestige, 263.