REAL AND IMAGINED READERS, censorship, publishing and reading under apartheid

230pp., paperback, Pietermaritzburg, 2018

Examines the period in South African literary history marked by apartheid censorship, the banning of intellectual and creative voices and the reading cultures, practices and alternative literary spaces that developed.

"Rachel Matteau Matsha has produced a marvellous study of how real and resourceful readers undermined the apartheid censorship apparatus. South African literary history can no longer overlook the alternative literary circuit during apartheid when ordinary readers accessed, copied, loaned, marketed and distributed books." Archie Dick, Professor of Information Science, University of Pretoria, and author of The Hidden History of South Africa's Book and Reading Cultures

"This book makes a significant contribution to an established body of work that proposes a return to a (reimagined) South African archive in order to retrieve a range of literary and cultural histories that have been lost to the historical record. It does this not only by documenting a hidden history of marginalised readers, inventive reading practices and cultures of engaged reading but also, in an innovative move, by shedding light on the ways in which readers, reading and 'literature' itself were envisaged and imagined in the censorship apparatus." Corinne Sandwith, Associate Professor of English, University of Pretoria, and author of World of Letters: reading communities and cultural debates in early apartheid South Africa

Rachel Matteau Matsha is a senior lecturer in the Department of Media, Language and Communication, Durban University of Technology.