Introduction to Reading from the South (eBook)

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.

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Isabel 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.