Overview

This book offers a compelling vision of the dynamism of local printing presses across colonial Africa and the new textual forms they generated. It invites a reconceptualisation of African literature as a field by revealing the profusion of local, innovative textual production that surrounded and preceded canonical European-language literary traditions. Bringing together examples of print production in African, Europea  and Arabic languages, it explores their interactions as well as their divergent audiences. It is grounded in the material world of local presses, printers, publishers, writers and readers, but also traces wider networks of exchange as some texts travelled to distant places. African print culture is an emerging field of great vitality, and contributors to this volume are among those who have inspired its development. This volume moves the subject forward onto new ground, and invites literary scholars, historians and anthropologists to contribute to the on-going collaborative effort to explore it.

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9781009622363

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Stephanie Newell is George M. Bodman Professor of Literature at Yale University. Her publications on West African print cultures address topics such as sexuality and gender, African readerships, authorial anonymity, epistolarity, and how to think about multicultural literary networks and encounters in colonial contexts. Her research on colonial-era African newspapers has introduced new methodologies and frameworks for thinking about newsprint creativity. Karin Barber is Emeritus Professor of African Cultural Anthropology at the University of Birmingham and Visiting Professor in Anthropology at the LSE. Her research focuses on Yoruba oral literature, popular theatre and print culture, and more broadly the comparative study of popular culture and textual production across Africa. Her prize-winning book 'Print Culture and the First Yoruba Novel' (2012) helped to inaugurate a new wave of interest in African-language print culture.

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