Page 36 - University of Pretoria Research Review 2017

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Uncovering South African’s publishing history
Elizabeth le Roux, Department of Information Science
What was the first book published in South Africa? Who wrote it? Who read it? What has happened to it since? And what does all of this tell us about our history, culture and identities over time.
These are the kinds of questions that first prompted Elizabeth le Roux, an associate professor in the Department of Information Science, to become interested in book history, a field that examines how people generate, produce, and use printed materials. Print remains a significant medium because people use it to communicate thoughts and ideas. Governments are often acutely aware of the power of print, and have used it to promote their own ideas (for instance through propaganda), and to limit certain kinds of communications through censorship.
Le Roux writes that censorship was a key tool of the apartheid government, and that its full reach and impact is still not fully understood. Her research into the development of crime fiction showed that this genre was subjected to more censorship than any other; the censors referred to crime and pulp fiction more broadly as ‘printed trash and poisonous scum’. This did not stop South Africans of all races from avidly reading the genre, and actively writing and publishing crime fiction – long before the days of Deon Meyer.
Her earlier research on publishing histories in South Africa is now being extended to examine more closely the role of publishing companies, especially Ravan Press, as platforms for subversion and protest. This project on ‘Histories of Publishing under Apartheid’ is undertaken in collaboration with Dr Caroline Davis of Oxford Brookes University (UK), with funding from
a Newton Mobility Grant, the Global Challenges Research Fund, and the British Academy. To investigate the role of printed materials in apartheid South Africa, the researcher needs to combine a variety of tools: examining the books themselves, uncovering neglected and even
forgotten publishers’ archives to read correspondence and production notes, and interviewing publishers, editors, authors and readers to gain a detailed picture of their experiences and memories.
Elizabeth le Roux organises annual conferences to raise the profile of book history and encourage more researchers to work in this area. She is
a Y1-rated researcher, and is co-editor of Book History, the journal of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP).
She published the first study of South Africa’s university presses in 2016
(A social history of the university presses in apartheid South Africa: Between complicity and resistance, Leiden: Brill); and in 2017, co-authored a book
on South African crime fiction (A survey of South African crime fiction, Pietermaritzburg: UKZN Press), a work described by German scholar Christine Matzke as a milestone in the study of this popular genre.