This multi-voiced volume offers a deep dive into the history, sociology and politics of the oldest South African university press.

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. But there were also opportunities, and 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 publisher, this volume asks how publishing can contribute to a broader understanding of Southern knowledge production.

This multi-voiced volume showcases the history of the Press’s publishing activities over 100 years: from documenting its evolution through book covers and giving credence to some of the leading black intellectuals and writers of the early 20th century and the success of those works in spite of their authors suffering significant racial marginalisation, to the role of women both in publishing and the spaces afforded to women’s writing on the Press’s list. The collection concludes with essays by contemporary authors who detail not only their experiences of working with southern publishers, but also the politics and influences governing their decisions to choose the Press over a Northern publisher.

The collection shows the strategies deployed by the Press to professionalise Southern knowledge making, in the process demonstrating how university presses in the global South support the scholarly missions of their universities for both local and global audiences.

South Africa's future is increasingly tied up with that of India. While trade and investment between the two countries is intensifying, they share long-standing historical ties and have much in common: apart from cricket, colonialism and Gandhi, both countries are important players in the global South. As India emerges as a major economic power, the need to understand these links becomes ever more pressing. Can the two countries enter balanced forms of exchange? What forms of transnational political community between these two regions have yet to be researched and understood? The first section of South Africa and India traces the range of historical connection between the two countries. The second section explores unconventional comparisons that offer rich ground on which to build original areas of study. This innovative book looks to a post-American world in which the global South will become ever more important. Within this context, the Indian Ocean arena itself and South Africa and India in particular move to the fore. The book's main contribution lies in the approaches and methods offered by its wide range of contributors for thinking about this set of circumstances.

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.

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.

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.

Print, Text and Book Cultures in South Africa explores the power of print and the politics of the book in South Africa from a range of 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 the colonial public sphere in the nineteenth century; orthography; "iimbongi," orature and the canon; book-collecting and libraries; print and transnationalism; 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. "Book History" or "Histories of the Book" has been an important and influential field in European and North American scholarship for at least three decades. This volume showcases the "History of the Book" within a South African context and its significance in South Africa's emerging studies of print culture.

Combining insights from imperial studies and transnational book history, this provocative collection opens new vistas on both fields through ten accessible essays, each devoted to a single book. Contributors revisit well-known works associated with the British empire, including Charlotte Bronte's "Jane Eyre," Thomas Macaulay's "History of England," Charles Pearson's "National Life and Character," and Robert Baden-Powell's "Scouting for Boys." They explore anticolonial texts in which authors such as C. L. R. James and Mohandas K. Gandhi chipped away at the foundations of imperial authority, and they introduce books that may be less familiar to students of empire. Taken together, the essays reveal the dynamics of what the editors call an "imperial commons," a lively, empire-wide print culture. They show that neither empire nor book were stable, self-evident constructs. Each helped to legitimize the other.
"Contributors." Tony Ballantyne, Elleke Boehmer, Catherine Hall, Isabel Hofmeyr, Aaron Kamugisha, Marilyn Lake, Charlotte Macdonald, Derek Peterson, Mrinalini Sinha, Tridip Suhrud, Andre du Toit

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.

At the same time that Gandhi, as a young lawyer in South Africa, began fashioning the tenets of his political philosophy, he was absorbed by a seemingly unrelated enterprise: creating a newspaper. Gandhi's Printing Press is an account of how this project, an apparent footnote to a titanic career, shaped the man who would become the world-changing Mahatma. Pioneering publisher, experimental editor, ethical anthologist-these roles reveal a Gandhi developing the qualities and talents that would later define him. Isabel Hofmeyr presents a detailed study of Gandhi's work in South Africa (1893-1914), when he was the some-time proprietor of a printing press and launched the periodical Indian Opinion. The skills Gandhi honed as a newspaperman-distilling stories from numerous sources, circumventing shortages of type-influenced his spare prose style. Operating out of the colonized Indian Ocean world, Gandhi saw firsthand how a global empire depended on the rapid transmission of information over vast distances. He sensed that communication in an industrialized age was becoming calibrated to technological tempos. But he responded by slowing the pace, experimenting with modes of reading and writing focused on bodily, not mechanical, rhythms. Favoring the use of hand-operated presses, he produced a newspaper to contemplate rather than scan, one more likely to excerpt Thoreau than feature easily glossed headlines. Gandhi's Printing Press illuminates how the concentration and self-discipline inculcated by slow reading, imbuing the self with knowledge and ethical values, evolved into satyagraha, truth-force, the cornerstone of Gandhi's revolutionary idea of nonviolent resistance.

How does a book become an international bestseller? What happens to it as it is translated into different languages, contexts, and societies? How is it changed by the intellectual environments it encounters? What does the transnational circulation mean for its reception back home? Exploring the international life of a particularly long-lived and widely traveled book, Isabel Hofmeyr follows "The Pilgrim's Progress" as it circulates through multiple contexts--and into some 200 languages--focusing on Africa, where 80 of the translations occurred.

This feat of literary history is based on intensive research that criss-crossed among London, Georgia, Kingston, Bedford (John Bunyan's hometown), and much of sub-Saharan Africa. Finely written and unusually wide-ranging, it accounts for how "The Pilgrim's Progress "traveled abroad with the Protestant mission movement, was adapted and reworked by the societies into which it traveled, and, finally, how its circulation throughout the empire affected Bunyan's standing back in England.

The result is a new intellectual approach to Bunyan--one that weaves together British, African, and Caribbean history with literary and translation studies and debates over African Christianity and mission. Even more important, this book is a rare example of a truly worldly study of "world literature"--and of the critical importance of translation, both linguistic and cultural.

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.

Combining insights from imperial studies and transnational book history, this provocative collection opens new vistas on both fields through ten accessible essays, each devoted to a single book. Contributors revisit well-known works associated with the British empire, including Charlotte Bronte's "Jane Eyre," Thomas Macaulay's "History of England," Charles Pearson's "National Life and Character," and Robert Baden-Powell's "Scouting for Boys." They explore anticolonial texts in which authors such as C. L. R. James and Mohandas K. Gandhi chipped away at the foundations of imperial authority, and they introduce books that may be less familiar to students of empire. Taken together, the essays reveal the dynamics of what the editors call an "imperial commons," a lively, empire-wide print culture. They show that neither empire nor book were stable, self-evident constructs. Each helped to legitimize the other.
"Contributors." Tony Ballantyne, Elleke Boehmer, Catherine Hall, Isabel Hofmeyr, Aaron Kamugisha, Marilyn Lake, Charlotte Macdonald, Derek Peterson, Mrinalini Sinha, Tridip Suhrud, Andre du Toit