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Description
On the basis of institutional and poetological analyses of legal trials concerning literature held in South Africa during the period 1910–2010, this study describes how the battles fought in and around the courts between literary, judicial, and executive elites eventually led to a constitutional exceptio artis (artistic freedom) for literature.
A thoroughly historicized account of legal positions about the growing institutional autonomy of literature in South Africa.
Censorship in apartheid-era South Africa was at once crudely repressive and strangely convoluted. When it came to literature this was in part because a small but influential group of censors, mainly literary academics but also some writers, attempted to defend the ideals of an autonomous ‘Republic of Letters’ from within the bureaucracy itself. In his deeply researched study of the longer judicial history of the exceptio artis in South Africa, Ted Laros fills in the legal back story to this fatal compromise, reflects on the complex role the courts played in supporting and limiting it, and considers its afterlife in the legislation underpinning the new South Africa’s constitutional democracy. Literature and Law in South Africa, 1910-2010 is indispensable reading not only for scholars and students interested in the cunning passages of the South African legal history, but for anyone who wishes to gain a better understanding of how the ideals of the European Enlightenment co-existed with, and sometimes abetted, the brutal exercise of power in the age of empire.
When does the unspeakable become sayable because it is said within the context of art? Ted Laros`s study of Apartheid and post-Apartheid censorship trials demonstrates how the literary field is constructed as one that lies outside the scope of legal censorship, which marks a decisive moment in the volatile relationship between law and literature. His study shows that this moment differs depending on the legal system and legal culture in which it occurs. It therefore addresses the changing racial and legal politics of South Africa to show how the autonomization of the literary field interacted with the state's changing conceptualization of itself.
Ted Laros is assistant professor of literary studies at the Open University of the Netherlands.
A thoroughly historicized account of legal positions about the growing institutional autonomy of literature in South Africa.
Censorship in apartheid-era South Africa was at once crudely repressive and strangely convoluted. When it came to literature this was in part because a small but influential group of censors, mainly literary academics but also some writers, attempted to defend the ideals of an autonomous ‘Republic of Letters’ from within the bureaucracy itself. In his deeply researched study of the longer judicial history of the exceptio artis in South Africa, Ted Laros fills in the legal back story to this fatal compromise, reflects on the complex role the courts played in supporting and limiting it, and considers its afterlife in the legislation underpinning the new South Africa’s constitutional democracy. Literature and Law in South Africa, 1910-2010 is indispensable reading not only for scholars and students interested in the cunning passages of the South African legal history, but for anyone who wishes to gain a better understanding of how the ideals of the European Enlightenment co-existed with, and sometimes abetted, the brutal exercise of power in the age of empire.
When does the unspeakable become sayable because it is said within the context of art? Ted Laros`s study of Apartheid and post-Apartheid censorship trials demonstrates how the literary field is constructed as one that lies outside the scope of legal censorship, which marks a decisive moment in the volatile relationship between law and literature. His study shows that this moment differs depending on the legal system and legal culture in which it occurs. It therefore addresses the changing racial and legal politics of South Africa to show how the autonomization of the literary field interacted with the state's changing conceptualization of itself.
Ted Laros is assistant professor of literary studies at the Open University of the Netherlands.