Introduction
Print Cultures and African Literature
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 October 2025
Summary
The introduction grounds African literary studies in practical and material considerations, and shows how print is a site of innovation and transformation. The print archive is shown to be full of texts which are now overlooked, but which enable us to understand much more about the literary productivity of the period, including what printed texts meant, socially and culturally, to their readers. An overview of the three sections of the volume is given, from Part I, which asks when independent African-owned printing presses emerged on the continent, what they published and where their readers were located, to Part II, which asks about the audiences for print culture and how they were convened, and Part III, which asks about the international networks of producers, distributors and readers behind the flows of texts on the continent. Emphasising specificities of language, religion and education, as well as the tangible social and political networks behind the circulation of texts, the introduction suggests that a locally sensitive approach to the study of print networks is essential to our understanding of global movements such as Black internationalism and Islam.
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- African Literature in TransitionPrint Cultures and African Literature, 1860–1960, pp. 1 - 12Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2025
References
Ballantyne, T. (2007). What difference does colonialism make? Reassessing print and social change in an age of global imperialism. In Alcorn Baron, S. et al., eds, Agent of Change: Print Culture Studies after Elizabeth L. Eisenstein. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, pp. 342–52.Google Scholar
Cagé, J. and Rueda, V. (2016). The long-term effects of the printing press in sub-Saharan Africa. American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 8 (3), 69–99.Google Scholar
Dodson, D. C. (1974). Onitsha pamphlets: Culture in the marketplace. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Wisconsin.Google Scholar
Eisenstein, E. L. (1980). The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fejzula, M. (2022). Gendered labour, negritude and the black public sphere. Historical Research: The Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 95 (269), 423–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gadzekpo, A. S. (2001). Women’s engagement with Gold Coast print culture from 1857 to 1957. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Birmingham.Google Scholar
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