The literature police
Subtitle: apartheid censorship and its cultural consequences
By: Peter D. McDonald.
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2009
Place of publication: Oxford; New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 416
ISBN-13: 9780199283347
Subjects: Censorship -- South Africa -- History; South African literature -- Censorship; Apartheid -- South Africa
Description: "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"--Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 365-399) and index.
Table of contents: title: Censors; title: Publishers; title: Writers; title: Nadine Gordimer and the strength of the African novel; title: Afrikan versus Volks humanism: Es'kia Mphahlele's worldly music and the transcendent space of culture; title: Connected versus internal critics:Breytenbach, Leroux, and the Volk avant-garde; title: BLAC books, black (anti-)poetics; title: J.M. Coetzee: the provincial storyteller; title: Protest and beyond: third world people's stories in the Staffrider series.