I Hofmeyr
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 39401 |
|---|---|
| NOME | I Hofmeyr |
| PRENOMES | I |
| SOBRENOME | Hofmeyr |
| ASSINATURA | HOFMEYR I |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of the Witwatersrand |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7904-5935 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 70 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 422 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 72 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1985 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 9 |
Plants, Politics, and Print in South Africa
African Literature in Transition
This book offers a compelling vision of the dynamism of local printing presses across colonial Africa and the new textual forms they generated. It invites a reconceptualisation of African literature as a field by revealing the profusion of local, innovative textual production that surrounded and preceded canonical European-language literary traditions. Bringing together examples of print production in African, Europea and Arabic languages, it exp…
Print Cultures and Printing Diasporas
This chapter frames African print and printing in a diasporic context, since most major African cities are or were home to a rich array of printing traditions. In coastal cities in southern and East Africa, one was likely to encounter Muslim printers from Bombay; Africans tutored at Protestant evangelical presses; Indians (and Britons) trained in mission, state-run or commercial printing concerns in South Asia; British printers as well as print w…
Archiving Environmental Change
This introduction describes the work of the Archiving Environmental Change working group, which emerged from the Transregional Collaboratory on the Indian Ocean, a programme established by the Social Science Research Council in 2019, with funding from the Mellon Foundation. The group set out to explore how the terms 'archives' and 'environment' change each other. This introduction considers two routes into this question of archives, environments …
There's a Bug in my Media
Traditionally a 'dry' discipline little concerned with ecocritical themes, book history has started to engage with environmental humanities in a more sustained way. This paper joins this trend by considering insects in colonial archives. Starting with the insects themselves, the paper considers state responses of fumigation, and what this means for definitions of books and literary genres. Situated at the intersection of insect, paper and chemica…
Black living as elemental politics
Reader Response to Dockside Reading
This piece responds to the three pieces on Dockside Reading. It provides background on the making of the book, its experimental nature, and discusses the ways in which the three responses extend the book’s reach and implications. The piece concludes with a description of the author’s new project, Elemental Reading
Water/colour/bead
Keywords design, embodied modes, humanities, interdisciplinary, materiality, multimodal practices, visual, oceanic
Reading for Water
This introduction provides a wide-ranging framing for a set of essays that explores the topic “Reading for Water” in southern African literature. The introduction begins by demonstrating this method through snapshots of three seminal South African novels: Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat (2006), A. C. Jordan’s The Wrath of the Ancestors (1980) and J. M. Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K (1983). This is followed by a discussion of Sarah Nuttall’s ess…
Dockside Reading
Isabel Hofmeyr traces the relationship between print culture, colonialism, and the ocean through the institution of the late-nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British colonial custom houses, which acted as censors and pronounced on copyright and checked imported printed matter for piracy, sedition, or obscenity
Reading in Antarctica
In April 2019, Isabel Hofmeyr and Charne Lavery, colleagues from the Oceanic Humanities for the Global South project based in Johannesburg, undertook a trip to the Antarctic peninsula. In this article, they discuss their shared yet distinct experiences of the same ten-day cruise, focused on the experience, history, literature, indispensability, and impossibility of reading in Antarctica. The article proceeds in three steps: ‘Not Reading in Antarc…
Histories of a Radical Book
Histories of a Radical BookA roundtable conversation on empire, colonialism, and E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class Antoinette Burton, Stephanie Fortado, Clare Anderson, Caroline Bressey, Ann Curthoys, Isabel Hofmeyr, and Utathya Chattopadhyaya CA: Antoinette, Stephanie: Histories of a Radical Book is an absolutely fascinating volume. Most historians have engaged with E.P. Thompson's work in one way or another, and yet beyond…
In the Custom House
In port cities, Customs and Excise fulfilled a number of literary functions. Their officials checked books to see that they were not pirated, seditious, or obscene, and they hence involved themselves in the protocols of copyright and censorship. This article examines the forms of reading associated with these activities and it argues that these modes of readings were shaped by the dockside procedures and routines that governed the work of Customs…
Thinking Oceanically
This special issue hosts a conversation between Ilha de Moçambique and its surrounding oceans and coastlines, convening a globally-oriented set of questions around a rich engagement with the local, and in so doing among material culture and new materialisms, maritime archaeology and poetry. Most significantly, it takes the idea of ‘East Africa’, as a region, underwater. Through shipwrecks, shells and sounds, it explores the possibility of incorpo…
Imperialism Above and Below the Water Line
This essay discusses postcolonial space both above and below the water line with a focus on Durban harbour. The essay begins underwater and examines how shipping and harbour engineering created new habitats in the port. The focus then moves onto land and considers two spaces: the Custom House and the space created by the mainly Zulu-speaking dockworkers in the port. These two locations illustrate the multi-scalar and multi-temporal nature of port…
Provisional Notes on Hydrocolonialism
This article discusses the meanings and applications of the rubric hydrocolonialism. Starting with a South African poem as an example, the piece sets out a definition of the term before outlining the existing literary scholarship that could fall under its umbrella. The article then turns to discuss hydrocolonial book history and what we might learn by tracing books on their oceanic journeys. One important node in these journeys was the port city,…
The sodden archive
There have been long traditions of maritime scholarship on human history at sea, tracing movements of people, ideas and objects across oceans. This work has however been human-centred and concerned only with the ocean as a backdrop. New versions of ocean studies asks us to engage with both human and non-human aspects of the ocean, with both the depth and the surface. This paper explores both approaches: taking a social and cultural history approa…
Literary Ecologies of the Indian Ocean
This article explores themes of literary ecologies and oceanic studies as a framework for a selection of articles. The article begins by outlining older approaches to oceanic studies which treat the ocean as surface and backdrop to human activity at sea. Rising sea levels and climate change, however, demand new approaches that can engage the materiality of the ocean, its surface and depth. This shift from surface to depth has prompted a set of ne…
The politics of the page
In this essay – which frames this special issue of Social Dynamics – we focus on the “exchange system,” by which newspaper editors mutually consented to reprint material from each other. The work of clipping, citation, condensation and republication were a creative part of the working pattern in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century newsrooms. The exchange system furnished editors and authors with transnational resources by which to experim…
The Portable Bunyan
Obituary
Obituaries are difficult to write - Phil Bonner’s especially so. The form sketches the bare bones of a life, hard to reconcile with Phil’s bursting, boundless vitality. In a eulogy for his colleagu
The Global South Atlantic
The Global South Atlantic
Southern by Degrees
Margins of the Market
AHR Conversation
This year, the AHR inaugurates what we hope to be an annual “Conversation” on topics of wide interest to historians. Inspired by our sister journal, the Journal of American History, which two years ago introduced its “Interchange” feature, our goal is to bring several historians together in a conversational encounter online, where ideas can be exchanged across different geographical, chronological, and subject specialties in a manner that will co…
The Portable Bunyan
The Complicating Sea
Within the academy, as transnational and oceanic forms of analysis become more prominent, the Indian Ocean attracts attention, especially as a domain that offers rich possibilities for working beyond the templates of the nation-state and area studies. The Indian Ocean makes visible a range of lateral networks that fall within the Third World or Global South. It is hence of particular relevance to those pursuing post–area studies scholarship and h…
The Black Atlantic Meets the Indian Ocean
With the recent transnational turn in the humanities and social sciences, questions of translocalism have come to dominate the academic agenda. Where southern African studies has engaged with transnationalism, this has generally been pursued through the framework of the black Atlantic. This article argues that we need to supplement this perspective with a systematic engagement with the Indian Ocean. The article outlines various major historiograp…
Introduction
The emergence of the Indian Ocean region as an important geo-political arena is being studied across a range of disciplines. Yet while the Indian Ocean has figured in Swahili studies and analyses of East and Southern African diasporic communities, it has remained outside the mainstream of African Studies. This introduction provides an overview of emerging trends in the rich field of Indian Ocean studies and draws out their implications for schola…
Popularizing History
Gustav Preller (1875–1943), a prolific and popular South African historian, is the man largely responsible for shaping many of the key myths of Afrikaner nationalism. One of these is the concept of the Great Trek, an interpretation of the nineteenth-century movement of Boers into the interior. It is Preller's written and visual version of this social movement that has been the dominant one for the last seven decades. Preller worked with a variety…
Sea Tracks and Trails
Cluster Abstract Though historians have long imagined it as a world both unto itself and integral to histories of global capital, nation‐building, imperial rivalry, and sustainability in many dimensions, the Indian Ocean and environs have become a preoccupation for scholars from a wide variety of locations, disciplinary, and institutional, in the last two decades. The essays in this cluster offer a thematic introduction to recent work in Indian O…
The Idea of ‘Africa’ in Indian Nationalism
(2007). The Idea of ‘Africa’ in Indian Nationalism: Reporting the Diaspora in The Modern Review 1907–1929. South African Historical Journal: Vol. 57, No. 1, pp. 60-81
Wailing for purity
This article gives a critical overview of recent trends and developments in the academic use of oral history. The paper focuses on some of the deep‐level assumptions guiding this work. The first of these is that the medium of the evidence — its ‘oralness’ — often confers a privileged status on the material being examined. Arising out of commonsense views of language which portray speech as authentic and intimate in contrast to the supposed deadne…
Margins of the Market
Popular Literature in Africa
(2004). Popular Literature in Africa: Post-Resistance Perspectives. Social Dynamics: Vol. 30, No. 2, pp. 128-140
Dockside Reading
Isabel Hofmeyr traces the relationship between print culture, colonialism, and the ocean through the institution of the late-nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British colonial custom houses, which acted as censors and pronounced on copyright and checked imported printed matter for piracy, sedition, or obscenity
The politics of the page
In this essay – which frames this special issue of Social Dynamics – we focus on the “exchange system,” by which newspaper editors mutually consented to reprint material from each other. The work of clipping, citation, condensation and republication were a creative part of the working pattern in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century newsrooms. The exchange system furnished editors and authors with transnational resources by which to experim…
Durban and Cape Town as Port Cities
This special issue arose out of a workshop titled ‘Durban and Cape Town as Indian Ocean Port \nCities: Reconsidering Southern African Studies from the Indian Ocean’, held at the University of the Western Cape in September 2014. The volume is located at the intersection of southern African studies and Indian Ocean studies, and explores this exchange as a site for enriching southern African transnational historiographies
Styling multilateralism
The Indian Ocean has long been held to be an important arena for bringing lateral, south-south links into view and hence for theorising the Global South. Yet, how is this vast and abstract idea being given substance in the Indian Ocean world? This article approaches this question from a cultural direction, looking at various cultural formations that address themselves to the Global South. The article makes sense of this material by sorting it int…
South Africa's Indian Ocean
During the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902), the British transported Boer prisoners of war to St Helena, Ceylon, India and Bermuda. This article examines the 9000 POWs who were sent to India. Rather than considering them only within the historiography of the South African War (where as failed soldiers they occupy a marginal position), the article places these POWs in the growing Indian Ocean scholarship. This historiography has generated a rich researc…
South Africa's Indian Ocean – Notes from Johannesburg
This article reviews the emerging intersections between southern African studies and Indian Ocean studies and the broader contexts enabling this dialogue. South Africa's political transition in 1994 encouraged an interest in South African histories that moved beyond an anti‐apartheid historiography of Black and White, while post‐Cold War imperatives and the rise of transnationalism have directed attention towards post‐area studies and oceanic mod…
The Globe in the Text1
Specificities
Jonah and the swallowing monster
(1991). Jonah and the swallowing monster: orality and literacy on a Berlin mission station in the Transvaal. Journal of Southern African Studies: Vol. 17, No. 4, pp. 633-653
Literary Ecologies of the Indian Ocean
This article explores themes of literary ecologies and oceanic studies as a framework for a selection of articles. The article begins by outlining older approaches to oceanic studies which treat the ocean as surface and backdrop to human activity at sea. Rising sea levels and climate change, however, demand new approaches that can engage the materiality of the ocean, its surface and depth. This shift from surface to depth has prompted a set of ne…
African History and Global Studies
Recent debates on global and world history have largely been shaped in the Euro-American academy, an arrangement that appears to deepen the growing divide between metropolitan and African universities. This article takes a more optimistic view arguing that twenty years of post-apartheid life has enabled a freer flow of people and ideas across the continent. These new networks have sparked projects that explore inter-regional exchanges and transna…
South Africa/India
No chief, no exchange, no story
South African Remains
E. P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class exercised a substantial influence on the South African academy and acted as a key shaper of a “history from below” movement in the 1980s. While Thompson's influence in South Africa has been celebrated, the limits of his circulation are less frequently explored. This article takes on this task by placing The Making alongside Steve Biko's I Write What I Like. Biko was a major figure in the em…
Books reviewed
Sylvester Stein, Second‐Class Taxi (Cape Town and Johannesburg: David Philip, 1983). Pp. 209. £4.45. Mbuyiseni Oswald Mtshali, Sounds of a Cowhide Drum (Johannesburg: Ad Donker, 1982). Pp. 92. £4.00. John Howland Beaumont, The Great Karoo (Cape Town and Johannesburg: David Philip, 1983). Pp. 96. £3.20. Sol T. Plaatje, Native Life in South Africa (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1982). Pp. xiii+437. £9.95. Paul B. Rich, White Power and the Liberal Cons…
Popularizing History
Gustav Preller (1875–1943), a prolific and popular South African historian, is the man largely responsible for shaping many of the key myths of Afrikaner nationalism. One of these is the concept of the Great Trek, an interpretation of the nineteenth-century movement of Boers into the interior. It is Preller's written and visual version of this social movement that has been the dominant one for the last seven decades. Preller worked with a variety…
Introduction
No chief, no exchange, no story
Jonah and the swallowing monster
(1991). Jonah and the swallowing monster: orality and literacy on a Berlin mission station in the Transvaal. Journal of Southern African Studies: Vol. 17, No. 4, pp. 633-653
Oral History as Farce? ‐ Oral History as a Changing Phenomenon
This article attempts to raise some issues in relation to the broader question of oral tradition as a phenomenon that changes in time. Common‐sense views on this topic have tended to posit an evolutionary model in terms of which oral forms wither in the face of “stronger” literate forms. By contrast, other views hold that oral tradition ‐ far from waning ‐ thrives on fragments, and that its producers are like bricoleurs who go to work with materi…
Kelwyn sole, postcolonialism, and the challenge of the local
Making symmetrical knowledge possible
David B Copian. 1994. In the Time of Cannibals: The Word Music of South Africa's Basotho Migrants. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. 300pp. Megan Biesele. 1993. Women Like Meat: The Folklore and Foraging Ideology of the Kalahari Ju/'hoan. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press. 225pp
Wailing for purity
This article gives a critical overview of recent trends and developments in the academic use of oral history. The paper focuses on some of the deep‐level assumptions guiding this work. The first of these is that the medium of the evidence — its ‘oralness’ — often confers a privileged status on the material being examined. Arising out of commonsense views of language which portray speech as authentic and intimate in contrast to the supposed deadne…
We Spend Our Years as a Tale That Is Told
Connections
Metaphorical books
The book in Africa
(2001). The book in Africa. Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa: Vol. 13, No. 2, pp. 1-8
Special Issue for Shula Marks
Bunyan in Africa Text and Transition
This article begins by pointing to the fact that current postcolonial literary theory often utilizes a surprisingly non-materialist theory of texts. Texts appear to be their own agents and are invested with extraordinary power in terms of which they can 'create obedient subjects'. They likewise 'circulate' and 'proliferate' creating meanings, effects and subjectivities as they go. How these processes occur is never made particularly clear, and in…
How Bunyan Became English
On 31 October 1847, the John Williams , a ship of the London Missionary Society, left Gravesend for the Pacific Islands from whence it had come. Its cargo included five thousand Bibles and four thousand copies of The Pilgrim's Progress in Tahitian. Like other such mission ships, the John Williams had been funded by the pennies and shillings of Sunday school subscription and had become a huge media spectacle. It was but one of the many internation…
Dreams, Documents and 'Fetishes
John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, a key text of the evangelical Protestant missionary movement, was translated into eighty African languages and consequently influenced African Christian intellectual traditions. This article examines one aspect of this influence, namely the ways in which Bunyan's portrayal of literacy in The Pilgrim's Progress became a site around which African reworkings of the text cohered. For Bunyan, a first-generation li…
Transnational circulation
This article starts from the premise that we lack an adequate theory of how texts travel. There is of course a wealth of postcolonial theory on traveling texts but it evinces little interest in the material trajectories of how texts are distributed and consumed. This article seeks to ask how we might bring such an understanding of texts into view and what the larger theoretical advantage of such a move might be. The article draws on recent work b…
Specificities
The Portable Bunyan
Popular Literature in Africa
(2004). Popular Literature in Africa: Post-Resistance Perspectives. Social Dynamics: Vol. 30, No. 2, pp. 128-140
Papa AK47’ or Lolita in Africa
Written in English from a lusophone region, Sousa Jamba’s Patriots has suffered critical neglect through occupying an interstitial space created by the artificial separation of anglophone and lusophone texts. This paper is a critical intervention aimed at making the novel available to a wider audience and situating it within current debates on the national and the transnational in contemporary literature. The article situates Patriots within a tr…
The Globe in the Text1
Popular cultural materials and public spheres
Book History in Southern Africa
History (48 obras) · Sociology (38 obras) · Political science (37 obras) · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories (23 obras) · History (22 obras) · Art (21 obras) · South African History and Culture (20 obras) · Geography (19 obras) · Law (18 obras) · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies (18 obras)