He is the author of four books, including Learning Zulu: A Secret History of Language in South Africa, Ambiguities of Witnessing: Law and Literature in the Time of a Truth Commission, and Complicities: The Intellectual and Apartheid.
Sanders applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, A Will for the Machine: Computerization, Automation, and the Arts in South Africa, with the following results:
Page 99 of A Will for the Machine is transitional, summarizing part of what has come before, and part of what comes after. It gives the reader a schematic overview of the theoretical implications of my arguments about how South African writers and artists engaged with technologies of automation and computerization in the context of apartheid and its racialization of labor. Coming a few pages into my book’s third chapter, which is about William Kentridge’s animated films, specifically Stereoscope, page 99 introduces the idea that there is a parallel between the automaticity of seeing and that of technologies such as film—the latter being imaginable because of the former. Chapter three is also historical, analyzing how Stereoscope depicts women telephone operators at the brink of the automation of telephone exchanges—which proceeded apace from the 1920s. Kentridge’s film thus asserts, generally, the indispensability of the human being who interacts with the machine. A century ago, such an assertion was integral to Kentridge’s grandfather’s political career. As a member of parliament for the Labour Party, Morris Kentridge was a prominent advocate for white South African workers. William Kentridge’s politics, often given expression in his art, have, by contrast, been non-racial. Page 99 also anticipates how, in the rest of my book, I show how artists have not only depicted workers interacting with machines, which I discuss in my chapters on authors Miriam Tlali and J.M. Coetzee—the latter produced computer poetry before his career as a novelist—but also bring before the eye what humans and machines have in common, which, I contend, is a condition of possibility for their interaction. This is especially apparent from the work of Handspring Puppet Company, which I discuss in the final chapter of my book.Learn more about A Will for the Machine at the University of Chicago Press website.
The Page 99 Test: Learning Zulu.
--Marshal Zeringue
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