Sarah Nuttall

This set of essays analyses the work of Isabel Hofmeyr, globally recognised as one of South Africa's foremost literary and Indian Ocean scholars. The essays elucidate Hofmeyr's path-breaking studies of transnational histories of the book, African print cultures, and cultural circulations in the Indian Ocean world. This book draws together reflective and analytical essays by renowned intellectuals from around the world who critically engage with the work of one of the global South's leading scholars of African print cultures and the oceanic humanities. Isabel Hofmeyr's scholarship spans more than four decades, and its sustained and long-term influence on her discipline and beyond is formidable. While much of the history of print cultures has been written primarily from the North, Isabel Hofmeyr is one of the leading thinkers producing new knowledge in this area from Africa, the Indian Ocean world and the global South. Her major contribution encompasses the history of the book as well as shorter textual forms and abridged iterations of canonical works such as John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress. She has done pioneering research on the ways in which such printed matter moves across the globe, focusing on intra-African trajectories and circulations as well as movements across land and sea, port and shore. The essays gathered here 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.

This book covers concepts and methods from the work of Isabel Hofmeyr, a leading South African scholar of print cultures and intellectual trajectories in the Atlantic and Indian oceans.

Teorierna om hur vädret på en viss plats påverkar invånarna peakade kanske på 1700-talet, men lever ändå i viss mån kvar i bilden av hur folk från en viss plats är. Så, är det då sant att det nästan alltid regnar i Göteborg? Tja, det regnar i snitt ungefär varannan dag. Nästan exakt lika ofta som i till exempel Stockholm och Malmö. Men visst, det regnar lite mer, lite hårdare de där dagarna i Göteborg, och regnet tar sig liksom på ett annorlunda sätt inpå huden. Det känns som om vädret är emot oss. Världen är emot oss. (ur inledningen till numret)

This original book is a much needed and far reaching exploration of post-apartheid South African life worlds. Entanglement aims to capture the contradictory mixture of innovation and inertia, of loss, violence and xenophobia as well as experimentation and desegregation, which characterises the present. The author explores the concept of entanglement in relation to readings of literature, new media forms and painting. In the process, she moves away from a persistent apartheid optic, drawing on ideas of sameness and difference, and their limits, in order to elicit ways of living and imagining that are just starting to take shape and for which we might not yet have a name. In the background of her investigations lies a preoccupation with a future-oriented politics, one that builds on largely unexplored terrains of mutuality while being attentive to a historical experience of confrontation and injury.