ABSTRACT
Censorship, book registration, copyright regulations and the like are all ways of controlling the seemingly unlimited potential for dissemination unleashed by proliferating technologies. There is little sign, however, that such methods control the flow of literature itself; indeed they often produce the countervailing effect of diverting that flow into ever more vigorous – if occasionally more circuitous – channels. Repression – a mode of resistance to promiscuous communication – provokes the reactive form of counterresistance known as protest, and with it further efforts at control, in widening cycles of confrontation. In this chapter I will be examining the configurations of such friction across South Asia and southern Africa. Readers sometimes wonder why so much postcolonial literature to date has been adversarial in tone. The contents of the present chapter may go some way towards explaining why this has been the case.
