Bushman Letters is an unusual and important book. It examines not only the /Xam archive but also, and in the first instance, the critical tradition that has grown up around the archive as well as the hermeneutic principles that inform that tradition. It critiques these principles and offers not so much alternative readings as alternative modes of reading. The book accomplishes two things: it shows the problems with the ways that the materials in the Bleek and Lloyd Collection have been approached by previous critics, and it suggests what their interpretations have left out in the...