Description
Book SynopsisIsabel 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 Hofmeyr’s work and the formidable contribution she has made to the study of African print cultures and oceanic humanities at large.
Table of Contents
- List of illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Southern Lodestar: Isabel Hofmeyr’s Life and Work – Charne Lavery
- Part I High, Low and In-between
- Chapter 1 Transformations – Khwezi Mkhize
- Chapter 2 African Popular Literatures Rising – James Ogude
- Chapter 3 Fluidity and Its Methodological Openings: Mobility and Discourse on the Eve of Colonialism – Carolyn Hamilton
- Chapter 4 Oral Genres and Home-Grown Print Culture – Karin Barber
- Part II Portable Methods
- Chapter 5 Overcomers: A Historical Sketch – Ranka Primorac
- Chapter 6 Hemispheric Limits: Rethinking the Uses of Diaspora from South Africa – Christopher EW Ouma
- Chapter 7 What’s the Rush? Slow Reading, Summary and A Brief History of Seven Killings – Madhumita Lahiri
- Chapter 8 Seeing Waters Afresh: Working with Isabel Hofmeyr – Lakshmi Subramanian
- Part III Oceanic Turns
- Chapter 9 A Turn to the Indian Ocean – Sunil Amrith
- Chapter 10 ‘The Sea’s Watery Volume’: More-than-Book Ontologies and the Making of Empire History – Antoinette Burton
- Chapter 11 Amphibious Form: Southern Print Cultures on Indian Ocean Shores – Meg Samuelson
- Chapter 12 Wood and Water: Resonances from the Indian Ocean – Rimli Bhattacharya
- Part IV Closing Reflections
- Chapter 13 Travel Disruptions: Irritability and Canonisation – Danai S Mupotsa and Pumla Dineo Gqola
- Proximate – Gabeba Baderoon
- Contributors
- Index
