Gandhi's Printing Press in South Africa -- Experiments in Slow Reading

This talk centers on Gandhi During his South African years (1893-1914), when he was involved in running a printing press and a newspaper, Indian Opinion. These textual experiments were not simply important in promoting Gandhi's political programmes, they equally provided one of the key sites for theorizing his ideas on satyagraha and sovereignty. And so the talk will explore how, by attending to the potentialities of printing in novel ways, Gandhi was able to imagine a radically new world.Professor Hofmeyr's current work focuses on Africa and its intellectual trajectories in the Atlantic and Indian oceans. Her earlier scholarship examined ways of historicising oral literature and its interactions with literacy. As South Africa's transition opened the country up to democracy and globalisation, Hofmeyr turned her attention to themes of transnationalism and textual circulation. More recently she has explored textual circulation in the Global South with a focus on the Indian Ocean. Her work addresses questions of Africa's intellectual place in the world and the material and aesthetic history of texts and their transnational circulation. Professor Hofmeyr has served as Acting Director of the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa (www.cisa-wits.org.za) which she helped to establish.