This article addresses the creation of Athol Fugard's plays not as performances or as texts, but as material objects, and examines how the meaning and value of his plays were constructed through the interventions of his publisher. The paper draws attention to the sharp distinction in the way that Fugard's performances and published plays have been received, most acutely with respect to the plays Sizwe Bansi is Dead, The Island and Statements After an Arrest Under the Immorality Act. These plays directly addressed and attacked apartheid legislation and enforcement. In performance in South Africa between 1972-1973 they were regarded as radical and subversive by the South African authorities as well as by audiences and critics. The Oxford University Press edition of this trilogy, Statements: Three Plays (1974), was by contrast packaged as a literary and commercial product that circulated free from censorship. This essay explores the reasons for this dichotomy through a detailed author/publisher case study of the publication history of the plays. It analyses the means by which Fugard was re-branded as an "Oxford author" through the book's publication in the Oxford Paperback Series, and assesses the impact of this brand on the reception of Fugard's plays. The published book was also a more individualistic creative product than the performances of the plays: the Press applied a conventional model of authorship which served to defuse the radical, interracial partnership between Fugard and his co-writers Winston Ntshona and John Kani. Likewise, the political content was neutralized as the plays were promoted as allegorical literary works of universal significance. By these means, it is argued, Fugard was successfully incorporated into the literary establishment in the UK, the USA and South Africa under apartheid.

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Research into print culture studies in Africa has largely been dominated by histories of how European missionaries, colonial administrators and traders brought the book and literacy to Africa, by what Isabel Hofmeyr describes as 'the idea of the imperial gift'. 1 Indeed, Africa has been marginalised within the discipline of book history, and has been either omitted or assigned only the briefest mention in the major book history companions, dictionaries and readers, while histories of British publishers routinely overlook their profitable enterprises in Africa. 2 As a result, a number of gaps and silences remain. This collection addresses some important issues that have been widely neglected; the focus here is on black southern African writing, publishing and readerships, in contrast with the often white-dominated narrative of print culture, even within African scholarship. Print culture holds important implications for questions of identity, nationality and colonial or post-colonial politics, and, as David Johnson states, there is a need for close attention to 'how "print, text and book cultures" have functioned and continue to function within South Africa's vastly unequal political economy'. 3 Drawing together interdisciplinary research and diverse methodologies, this journal special issue encompasses a range of perspectives, including literary studies, anthropology, publishing studies, the history of the book, art history and information science. Many of the articles are based on previously unexamined archives and collections, for example authors', publishers' and state archives, and oral history research. They are, thus, evidence-based histories that uncover previously unacknowledged or unheard voices and that counter the anecdotal nature of much research on African publishing and print culture. 4 This work has its origins in the British Academy project 'Print Culture and Publishing in South Africa in the 20th Century' (2012-16), based at Oxford Brookes University and the University of Pretoria and led by the guest editors of this volume. This project promoted research into the emergence and constitution of reading publics in the country, the trans-regional networks of print, and the impact of the transnational book trade. A programme of colloquia and seminars in the UK and South Africa brought together international scholars from both regions as fora for multi-disciplinary research. Many of the articles in this issue are based on papers presented in the final three conferences of the project: Print Culture and Colonisation in Africa at the University of Cape Town (May 2015), the Annual Book History and Print Culture seminar at the University of Pretoria (May 2016), and the Print Culture and Publishing in Africa colloquium at Oxford Brookes University (September 2016).

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