International conference to be held at Centre for the Book

Cape Town, 2-4 April 2007

This Conference is the fourth in a series of regional conferences in Sydney, Wellingtonand Kolkata following the COLONIAL AND POST-COLONIAL CULTURES OF THE BOOK held at RhodesUniversity, Grahamstown in 2001.

It is organised by Professor John Gouws of RhodesUniversity, under the aegis of the Society for the History of Authorship, Readingand Publishing.

The conference will address a wide range of questions relating to 'the history of the book' in colonial and post-colonial contexts. Relevant topics include:

national and transnational communities of letters; alternative public spheres; censorship; the history of reading and reading theories; reviewing and criticism; authorship; sociologies of the text; text and image; the economies of cultural prestige; media history; the cultures of collecting; library history; literacy; oral cultures; orality and print; printing and publishing history; the marketing and distribution of books; the electronic text; and the future of the book.

The purpose is to bring together all stakeholders: academics working in the fields of Textual Studies, Book and Cultural History, the Media, Anthropology, and new and old technologies of the text, archivists, librarians, educationalists, publishers, public administrators, funding bodies and government. It is hoped that special attention will be given to the development of protocols for recording Southern African orature and performance art.

For more information on the conference please visit the following website:

http://www.ru.ac.za/conferences/aworldelsewhere/index.html