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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Brings to life the dynamism and creativity of local printing presses and the texts they produced in colonial Africa.
Introduction: print cultures and African Literature Stephanie Newell and
Karin Barber; Part I. Producing Print:
1. The press at work: five snapshots;
1.1 The press at work: Gakaara wa Wanja Press Simon Gikandi; 1.2 Of rickety
old printpresses in ramshackle printrooms and the stories they told: the
African press in colonial Kenya 19201960s Phoebe Musandu; 1.3 'Where money
goes before, all ways do lie open': on some practicalities of the newspaper
business in 1920s and 1930s Lagos Katharina A. Oke; 1.4 Polyglossia and
loanwords in the Tanganyikan press, 19161961 James R. Brennan; 1.5 The West
African Pilot and the creation of an anti-colonial readership Ngozi Edeagu;
2. Expansive languages in nineteenth-century Central Africa: missionary
dictionaries between command and dialogue Harri Englund;
3. Print cultures
and printing diasporas: Gandhi, Dube and white printworkers in Durban Isabel
Hofmeyr;
4. George McCall Theal's urge to publish and his collaborative
printing process, 18621882 Sam Naidu;
5. A tale of two print cultures: Hausa
texts in Ajami and Roman script Graham Furniss;
6. Still images, moving
images: movie posters and film spectatorship in colonial West Africa Odile
Goerg; Part II. Readers and Audiences:
7. Black South African intellectuals
and the question of colonial modernity Khwezi Mkhize;
8. 'How to cultivate a
love for reading': literacy, madness, and African selfhood in the Sierra
Leone weekly news Thomas Keegan;
9. Print culture and new fictional
imagination in colonial Egypt Lucie Ryzova;
10. A century of readers and
readings: Abantu Abamnyama, 19222022 Hlonipha Mokoena; Part III. New Genres:
Form, Local Aesthetics and Literary Creativity in Periodicals:
11. Linguistic
cohabitation and the equivalences of print Karin Barber;
12. Autoethnographic
expression and the politics of educational adaptation: the Nigerian teacher
and Nigeria magazines Terri Ochiagha;
13. Satirical Street literature: city
archiving and its afterlives Corinne Sandwith;
14. Pioneers of the popular:
literary experimentation in Swahili press writings in Tanganyika, 1930s50s
Maria Suriano;
15. Orthographic arguments: language debates in Swati
newspapers of the 1950s and 1960s Joel Cabrita and Thato Sukati;
16.
'Usefully unofficial' reading: Onitsha market literature and Anglophone print
cultures in colonial Nigeria Stephanie Newell; Part IV. Worlds of Print:
17.
Double-sided Print: silent and communal reading during the rise of Islamic
print in East Africa, c. 18801940 Anne K. Bang;
18. Between the railway and
the minaret: transregional Swahili Muslim booklets and transition in East
African print culture, 19301960 Annachiara Raia;
19. Making audiences:
Gäbrä-gziabher Gila-Maryam as a forerunner of Ethiopian print culture,
18951914 Sara Marzagora;
20. Print and the question of literature in Islamic
West Africa Jeremy Dell;
21. Print networks in the Black Atlantic world, c.
19201960 Leslie James and Myles Osborne;
22. 'A curious creature from the
market': world literature and the 'Complete Gentleman' stories Tobias Warner.
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.
