Publisher's Synopsis
This is the story of how allegories of human value, cast in narrative dualities based on ""civilization"" and ""barbarism"", were prescribed, reified and denied in the 19th-century's struggles over human identity in South Africa. As fluid forms of subjectivity and pre-national persuasion slowly emerged into the stratifications, boundaries and principalities later to become ""South Africa"", a battle was waged to give textual form and narrative shape to conceptions of ""proper"" human presentation. This process, illustrating how pervasive a broad sense of textuality may have been in the settling of material destinies, coincided with the supremacy of the book and the printed text as ultimate media for resolving questions of all kinds, from the mundane to the transcendental. The book takes a view of colonialism in South Africa - missionary colonialism in particular - as a discursive process rather than ""realpolitik"" primarily, and in so doing tells an important tale about the stories which were partly responsible for delivering South Africa into the paradoxical ""modernity"" of segregation and apartheid.
