Small and joined in print: Ivan Vladislavić, “Tsafendas’s Diary,” and Staffrider magazine (1988)

ABSTRACT This essay looks to the presence of the publishing “backroom” in the work of South African writer Ivan Vladislavić. Vladislavić was employed by Johannesburg-based Ravan Press as their Social Studies Editor in 1984; his short, overtly anti-realist story, “Tsafendas’s Diary,” was published in Ravan’s flagship magazine Staffrider in 1988 (7 (1)), notably the first issue to which Vladislavić was formally attached as assistant editor. Prior to its appearance in Missing Persons (1989), Vladislavić’s first single-authored collection, this story’s publication in Staffrider provides an opportunity to revisit its critical ethical drives in ways unavailable in the relatively unitary product of the book. I offer a “small” reading of “Tsafendas’s Diary” in its earliest print context as a formative example of Vladislavić’s unique, cooperative way of working with others, arguing for the various ways the text “joins in” with the overlapping sets of the smaller, decentred print communities gathered by the radical activist and anti-apartheid solidarities of the magazine. The centrality of independent publishing, editing and production become legible in this reading, and so, their significance to Vladislavić’s ongoing literary labour and its subtle textual negotiations of his position as a white anglophone writer and editor, art critic and “public intellectual.”