Peter McDonald lectures in Calcutta

CENTRE FOR STUDIES IN SOCIAL SCIENCES,
R 1 BAISHANBGHATA PATULI,
KOLKATA 700094

GENERAL SEMINAR

Dr Peter D. McDonald
Fellow and University Lecturer, St Hugh's College Oxford,

will give a talk titled

Literature and the Social Sciences: An Awkward Alliance?

Date: Monday, 7 September, 2009
Time: 3-5 PM.
Venue: CSSSC Seminar Room, Patuli Campus

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JADAVPUR UNIVERSITY DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
Lecture on 8th September, 2009 at 4 pm
Venue: AV Room, Dept of English


Dr Peter McDonald of St Hugh's College Oxford will give a talk titled
Policing Literature in Apartheid South Africa

at the AV Room, Dept of English, on Tuesday 8th September 2009 at 4pm. Some books of interest from OUP will be on sale at the venue.

'Censorship may have to do with literature', Nadine Gordimer once said, 'but literature has nothing whatever to do with censorship.' As the history of many repressive regimes shows, this vital borderline has seldom been so clearly demarcated. Just how murky it can sometimes be is compellingly exemplified in the case of apartheid South Africa. For reasons that were neither obvious nor historically inevitable, the apartheid censors were not only the agents of the white minority government's repressive anxieties about the medium of print. They were also officially-certified guardians of the literary. I have examined this paradoxical situation in detail in my most recent book The Literature Police (OUP, 2009) . For the purposes of this talk, I shall set out some of the general questions it raises and consider its consequences in relation to one, internationally notorious case.