African Literature in Transition: Volume 3

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.

• 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 Wanjaũ Press Simon Gikandi; 1.2 Of rickety old printpresses in ramshackle printrooms and the stories they told: the African press in colonial Kenya 1920–1960s 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, 1916–1961 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, 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.