Reading relations: Kenya and South Africa

Abstract

Through a self-reflexive mode, this essay explores a set of reading experiences using Italo Calvino’s perspectives on reading classics, and Tony Bennett’s theorisation of reading formations. Calvino prioritises the text as a stable object with inherent capacity to generate different reading experiences, while Bennett insists on the text’s multiplicity. What is clear from both scholars is that reading is a highly contested practice: who reads, what they read, when they read, how they read, what meanings they derive from reading, what meanings they should or shouldn’t derive from reading are concerns that have historically swirled around reading, in many cultural contexts. In this essay, I offer snapshots of the patterns these concerns have taken in my reading experience as a variously untutored, tutored, youthful and adult reader in Kenya and South Africa; both locations being discursively laden with ideological views on literature and its political labour. The essay surfaces the contradictions that flow through the English and Kiswahili narratives I read, their enmeshment in these ideological contestations and their imprint on my reading experiences across the tutored-untutored continuum.