African Literature in Transition
African Literature in Transition
£95.00
GBPThis 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.
- Brings together histories of print culture from across the African continent
- Enables students of African literature to understand Anglophone writing as one part of a wider, highly dynamic multilingual field, rather than focusing exclusively on a single linguistic tradition
- Grounds its approach in the material operations of local, small-scale African printing presses, showing how they could generate innovative, experimental texts
Product details
October 2025Hardback
9781009622363
350 pages
229 × 152 mm
Not yet published - available from October 2025
Table of Contents
- Introduction: print cultures and African Literature Stephanie Newell and Karin Barber
- Part I. Producing Print:
- 1. The press at work: five snapshots
- 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, 1862–1882 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, 1922–2022 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, 1930s–50s 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. 1880–1940 Anne K. Bang
- 18. Between the railway and the minaret: transregional Swahili Muslim booklets and transition in East African print culture, 1930–1960 Annachiara Raia
- 19. Making audiences: Gäbrä-Əgziabher Gila-Maryam as a forerunner of Ethiopian print culture, 1895–1914 Sara Marzagora
- 20. Print and the question of literature in Islamic West Africa Jeremy Dell
- 21. Print networks in the Black Atlantic world, c. 1920–1960 Leslie James and Myles Osborne
- 22. 'A curious creature from the market': world literature and the 'Complete Gentleman' stories Tobias Warner.
