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A University of Sussex PhD thesis Available online via Sussex Research Online: http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/ This thesis is protected by copyright which belongs to the author. This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the Author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the Author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Please visit Sussex Research Online for more information and further details Restless collection: Ivan Vladislavić and South African literary culture Katie Reid PhD Colonial and Postcolonial Cultures University of Sussex January 2017 For my parents. 1 Acknowledgments With thanks to my supervisor, Professor Stephanie Newell, who inspired and enabled me to begin, and whose drive and energy, and always creative generosity enlivened the process throughout. My thanks are due to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for funding the research. Thanks also to the Harry Ransom Center, at the University of Texas in Austin, for a Dissertation Fellowship (2011-12); and to the School of English at the University of Sussex for grants and financial support to pursue the research and related projects and events throughout, and without which the project would not have taken its shape. I am grateful to all staff at the research institutions I have visited: with particular mention to Gabriela Redwine at the HRC; everyone at the National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown; and all those at Pan McMillan, South Africa, who provided access to the Ravan Press archives. Personal thanks and acknowledgments are due to Fourie Botha, publisher at Umuzi, for his time; Pamela Thurschwell for her timely sensitivity and for reading the draft; my colleagues Ben Noys and Fiona Price, and to Kai Easton, for their kindness, belief, rigour, and stimulus; to Africa in Words; to James Graham and our always convivial, always ‘joint’ work; and Anthony Leaker, and to all who sustained things throughout with conversations and friendship. Also, to Nicola and Lauren; to Zandra and Alexander (and St Artaud), and to Roddy, without each of whom the writing would have been made in a much narrower field. I am especially grateful to Ivan Vladislavic , whose generosity and undaunted patience with his time, materials, and personal archive (not to mention with the postal service between Johannesburg and Brighton) has sustained the writing of this thesis. Minky Schlesinger’s various kindnesses have also been an unexpected pleasure and have nudged the research accordingly. The thesis would not have been possible without Sheila Reid and James Gormley, to whom I owe much more than thanks. Their love and support are the heart of this work. 2 University of Sussex Katie Reid, PhD in Colonial and Postcolonial Cultures Restless Collection: Ivan Vladislavic and South African Literary Culture Summary This thesis explores Ivan Vladislavić’s negotiation of the call for a specifically South African ‘signatured authorship’ as his body of work travels its literary marketplaces. Identifying an accretive logic and a curatorial mode through a series of his prose- fictions, it seeks to contribute to emergent discussions about Vladislavić’s increasing visibility on the world-literary stage and the difficulties of positioning his canny reflexive texts on its terms. Between print-cultural and textualist approaches, the thesis registers the imprint in Vladislavić’s oeuvre of other roles and institutional spaces he has occupied in South African literary culture – as an editor, a parallel career begun with oppositional publishers Ravan Press in 1984, and in his longstanding engagement with the visual arts and urban studies – to investigate the ways that Vladislavić’s authorial position simultaneously evokes and displaces white, Anglo-South African literary authority. My readings, focused on acts of collecting, collector figures and collections of ‘small’ locally produced texts, thus range between the neglected pre-lives of stories collected by Vladislavić’s first book, to the multiple textual surfaces and self-references embedded across his most recent novel. Engaging the critical figure of ‘gathering’ and its crossings in the discursive institutions of literature and the archive, I open a number of interrelated concerns with writing South Africa from a site of cultural privilege, and with them, Vladislavić’s subtle and complex handling of attendant questions, of assembly, custodianship, and proprietorial relations. Tracing Vladislavić’s ‘gatherings’ and their variously accreted ‘worlds’, I argue that they are reciprocally resistant to market strategies of accommodation whilst enacting a performative and aesthetic openness to the world. My thesis therefore demonstrates a paradoxical relationship of Vladislavić’s work to unified literary spaces, the often vexed (post)national and global literary-critical categorisations, and his emergence as a South African ‘world writer’. 3 Contents Acknowledgments ............................................................................................................................... 1 Summary ................................................................................................................................................. 2 Contents .................................................................................................................................................. 3 Table of figures .................................................................................................................................................. 4 Introduction: South African World Writer ................................................................................. 5 Part I. The Collection: emergent inheritance ......................................................................... 21 Divergent aesthetics: unsettling book culture and the states of emergency. Local, ‘micro- local’, and international Missing Persons (1989; 2010) .................................................................. 21 1. States of emergence: transitional networks and print culture. ‘Little’ locals, ‘small’ magazines ......................................................................................................................................................... 25 2. Inheritance: editing, curating – care and dispatch. Ravan and Staffrider .......................... 78 Mobilizing local(e)s ....................................................................................................................................106 Part II. Collectors: suspended custodianship ...................................................................... 108 ‘But they don’t belong to you’: letter-texts and the postal-political .......................................108 3. The Restless Supermarket: Proofing the Postal-political .........................................................122 4. Collecting Double Negatives and making the postal image....................................................153 Proliferating containment: excessive address .................................................................................170 Part III. Collecting: exhibiting .................................................................................................... 174 Visual culture and literary markets: ‘breakout’ international texts .......................................174 5. Travelling the Literary Marketplace: seeing the collectible in Portrait with Keys ........187 6. ‘Worlding’ the virgule: TJ/Double Negative ..................................................................................207 Collected-curated .........................................................................................................................................230 Conclusion collecting: sideways ................................................................................................ 232 Bibliography ..................................................................................................................................... 256 4 Table of figures Figure 1: ‘Excerpts from a comic-book by Jeff Lok based on the story ‘Tsafendas’s Diary’. (Staffrider. 1988, 7:1, 62-63). ................................................................................................. 104 Figure 2. Portrait with Keys: Joburg and what-what, Umuzi back cover and barcode detail with the genre ascription of ‘Joburg’ (2006a). ...................................................................... 198 Figure 3. Portrait with Keys: The City of Johannesburg Unlocked, Portobello back cover and barcode detail (2007a). ........................................................................................................... 198 Figure 4. Norton back cover and genre designation detail, ~ The City of Johannesburg Unlocked (2009a). .................................................................................................................... 199 Figure 5. Portrait with Keys: -Joburg & what-what (2006a); and -The City of Johannesburg Unlocked (2007a and 2009a). ................................................................................................. 200 Figure 6. ‘Contents’ maps/pages, blank__Architecture, apartheid and after (1998: np). ... 239 Figure 7. Pages from The Model Men exhibition catalogue (2004a: 14; 15). .....................