Letters from Underground

What is the difference between reading and “giving a reading”? This essay explores that question and the different forms of approaching it given by anthropology and literary criticism while examining letters sent from underground by informal miners who have been the object of state-sponsored sieges in South Africa. It considers these brief missives against the backdrop of a rich tradition of letter-writing and reading by migrant miners (where epistles are frequently read aloud and in public), as well as the solicitation of affidavits for cases brought on behalf of the miners in human rights cases. Attentive to the mediatic status of the letters as they circulate in the mass media, the essay explores a history of theorizing reading and authorship as either a demand or a condemnation of “literalness” and explores the relationship between this demand or condemnation and the problem of demetaphorization in accusations of inhumanity, especially as it gets coded as cannibalism.