The literature police : apartheid censorship and its cultural consequences

Author(s)

Bibliographic Information

The literature police : apartheid censorship and its cultural consequences

Peter D. McDonald

Oxford University Press, 2009

  • : hbk
  • : pbk.

Available at  / 5 libraries

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Note

Bibliography: p. 391-399

Includes index

First published in paperback 2010

Description and Table of Contents

Volume

: hbk ISBN 9780199283347

Description

'Censorship may have to do with literature', Nadine Gordimer once said, 'but literature has nothing whatever to do with censorship.' As the history of many repressive regimes shows, this vital borderline has seldom been so clearly demarcated. Just how murky it can sometimes be is compellingly exemplified in the case of apartheid South Africa. For reasons that were neither obvious nor historically inevitable, the apartheid censors were not only the agents of the white minority government's repressive anxieties about the medium of print. They were also officially-certified guardians of the literary. This book is centrally about the often unpredictable cultural consequences of this paradoxical situation. Peter D. McDonald brings to light a wealth of new evidence - from the once secret archives of the censorship bureaucracy, from the records of resistance publishers and writers' groups both in the country and abroad - and uses extensive oral testimony. He tells the strangely tangled stories of censorship and literature in apartheid South Africa and, in the process, uncovers an extraordinarily complex web of cultural connections linking Europe and Africa, East and West.The Literature Police affords a unique perspective on one of the most anachronistic, exploitative, and racist modern states of the post-war era, and on some of the many forms of cultural resistance it inspired. It also raises urgent questions about how we understand the category of the literary in today's globalized, intercultural world.

Table of Contents

  • Preface
  • Note to the Reader
  • PART I: CREATING SPACES/GUARDING BORDERS
  • 1. Censors
  • 2. Publishers
  • 3. Writers
  • PART II: SINGULAR SITUATIONS/DISRUPTIVE MOMENTS
  • 1. Nadine Gordimer and the Strength of African Fiction
  • 2. Afrikan versus Volks Humanism: Es'kia Mphahlele's Worldly Music and the Transcendent Space of Culture
  • 3. Connected versus Internal Critics: Breytenbach, Leroux and the Volk Avant Garde
  • 4. BLAC Books, Black (Anti-)Poetics
  • 5. J. M. Coetzee: The Provincial Storyteller
  • 6. Protest and Beyond: Third-World People's Stories in the Staffrider Series
  • Postscript
  • Acknowledgements
  • Chronology
  • Bibliography
Volume

: pbk. ISBN 9780199591114

Description

'Censorship may have to do with literature', Nadine Gordimer once said, 'but literature has nothing whatever to do with censorship.' As the history of many repressive regimes shows, this vital borderline has seldom been so clearly demarcated. Just how murky it can sometimes be is compellingly exemplified in the case of apartheid South Africa. For reasons that were neither obvious nor historically inevitable, the apartheid censors were not only the agents of the white minority government's repressive anxieties about the medium of print. They were also officially-certified guardians of the literary. This book is centrally about the often unpredictable cultural consequences of this paradoxical situation. Peter D. McDonald brings to light a wealth of new evidence - from the once secret archives of the censorship bureaucracy, from the records of resistance publishers and writers' groups both in the country and abroad - and uses extensive oral testimony. He tells the strangely tangled stories of censorship and literature in apartheid South Africa and, in the process, uncovers an extraordinarily complex web of cultural connections linking Europe and Africa, East and West. The Literature Police affords a unique perspective on one of the most anachronistic, exploitative, and racist modern states of the post-war era, and on some of the many forms of cultural resistance it inspired. It also raises urgent questions about how we understand the category of the literary in today's globalized, intercultural world.

Table of Contents

  • Preface
  • Note to the Reader
  • PART I: CREATING SPACES/GUARDING BORDERS
  • 1. Censors
  • 2. Publishers
  • 3. Writers
  • PART II: SINGULAR SITUATIONS/DISRUPTIVE MOMENTS
  • 1. Nadine Gordimer and the Strength of African Fiction
  • 2. Afrikan versus Volks Humanism: Es'kia Mphahlele's Worldly Music and the Transcendent Space of Culture
  • 3. Connected versus Internal Critics: Breytenbach, Leroux and the Volk Avant Garde
  • 4. BLAC Books, Black (Anti-)Poetics
  • 5. J. M. Coetzee: The Provincial Storyteller
  • 6. Protest and Beyond: Third-World People's Stories in the Staffrider Series
  • Postscript
  • Acknowledgements
  • Chronology
  • Bibliography

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