‘Political struggles in South Africa were frequently articulated in cultural terms, and forms of political critique often took shape as arguments about literature and the reading of texts’, Prof. Corinne Sandwith said during her inaugural lecture on 26 October 2021. ‘What this recognition demands is an amplified understanding of the history of political struggle as played out in part in aesthetic cultural terms.’

Prof. Sandwith’s address was titled ‘The Social Lives of Print: Circuits, Citation and Public Debates’, and opened with a quote from Mike Kirkwood: ‘The cultural history South Africa is best represented as a heap of fragments which are cut off from each other’. Drawing on Shane Graham’s arguments in relation to the work of the TRC, she suggests that narrating the past must always be an inductive enterprise, one of decoding meaning from absence, loss and rupture. As her research on African literature and culture attests, much of this fragmented history is to be found in the popular periodical press.

The lecture details some of the ‘historical digging projects’ Prof Sandwith has engaged in over the past twenty-five years. Following A.C. Jordan, she reads South African periodical print culture and the publics they convened as key sights for the recovery of lost or hidden intellectual and cultural traditions:

‘The reconstruction of this alternative archive necessitates a methodology of reading and historicising the fragment. It involves the analysis of traces, bits and pieces, oddments and remainders. So, working with the discontinuous incomplete archive demands a reading of gaps, a reading across gaps, an always provisional methodology of juxtaposition and tentative assemblage and an equally tentative analysis of the patterns these fragments form and the ways in which they shift over time.’

Prof. Sandwith presented several such fragments from the archives of the South African periodical press and explored the value of reading the popular periodical press as a lens on South African intellectual, political and cultural life. Her work unpacks the tone and temporal context of the pieces to uncover the depth with which writers convey meaning.

Her methodology of reading the fragment is accompanied by a focus on the social lives of print. This is a practice of relational or affinitive reading which acknowledges the multiple textual entanglements, affiliations, and borrowings that mark the South African print and public spheres: relational reading is also concerned with the multiple intersections and connections between newspapers and periodicals themselves, and the central role of periodical culture in ‘forging intra-African, Pan-Africanist and diasporic imaginaries’. In this vein, her research has widened from ‘tracking a history of dissonant aesthetics and alternative reading cultures to consider the periodical press more generally as an overlooked archive of black intellectual life, literary culture, political debate, and transnational culture.’ In particular, she argues, reading south African intellectual history through the lens of periodical print culture also helps to shed light on hidden histories of black women’s public sphere engagements, ‘a history that has been particularly vulnerable to erasure.’

Prof. Sandwith highlights four main points of focus within the broader project of mapping the South African print sphere: dissonant cultural debates, periodicals as alternative writing/publishing arenas, women’s appropriations of the newspaper space, and newspapers’ activation of transnational and anti-colonial imaginaries. Highlighting several key cultural interventions by Es’kia Mphahlele, AC Jordan and Mafika Gwala, along with practices of reading and the circulation of books that characterised the Communist Party of South Africa and the New Era Fellowship, she drew attention to a long and vital history of dissonant cultural debate and the changing historical circumstances which provoked them. Drawing attention to the important role that newspapers had played in providing a space or platform for black literary expression and stylistic experimentation, she also showed how black women in particular had refashioned the generally conservative space of the ‘Women’s Page’ to their own purposes, thus using the page as a space to tell their own stories and to contest some of the dominant gender norms of the day. She concluded with a discussion of the role played by the periodical press in highlighting pan-Africanist and diasporic links through its coverage of and commentary on the Italian invasion of Abyssinia, a discussion which also re-activated an established ‘Ethiopianist’ practice of reading canonical texts such as the Bible against the grain in the interests of a more radical, black-centred politics.

Prof. Vasu Reddy, the Dean of the Faculty of Humanities, thanked Prof. Sandwith for her important contribution to our understanding of a cultural history of South Africa. Prof Sandwith, he says, ‘demonstrates the utility of a relational reading that directs us to the multiple intersections and connections between newspapers and periodicals and of course the central role of the periodical press in forging, what she has termed, intra-African, Pan-Africanist, diasporic, internationalist imaginaries and solidarities.’