Newsprint Literature and Local Literary Creativity in West Africa, 1900s – 1960s

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A01=Stephanie Newell
African literature
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
anticolonial nationalism
Author_Stephanie Newell
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Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=DS
Category=HBJH
Category=HBTQ
Category=JBCC
Category=JFC
Category=NHH
Category=NHTQ
Cold War
colonial power relations
colonialism
COP=United Kingdom
cultural history
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Language_English
Onitsha market literature
PA=Available
Price_€50 to €100
PS=Active
softlaunch
transatlantic Black studies
West African newspapers
West African press

Product details

  • ISBN 9781847013828
  • Weight: 497g
  • Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
  • Publication Date: 17 Oct 2023
  • Publisher: James Currey
  • Publication City/Country: GB
  • Product Form: Hardback
  • Language: English
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Winner: 2024 Gustav Ranis International Book Prize Groundbreaking examination of literary production in West African newspapers and local printing presses in the first half of the 20th century, which adds an African perspective to transatlantic Black studies, and shows how African newsprint creativity has shaped readers' ways of imagining subjectivity and society under colonialism. From their inception in the 1880s, African-owned newspapers in 'British West Africa' carried an abundance of creative writing by local authors, largely in English. Yet to date this rich and vast array of work has largely been ignored in critical discussion of African literature and cultural history. This book, for the first time, explores this under-studied archive of ephemeral writing - from serialised fiction to poetry and short stories, philosophical essays, articles on local history, travelogues and reviews, and letters - and argues for its inclusion in literary genres and anglophone world literatures. Combining in-depth case studies of creative writing in the Ghana and Nigeria press with a major reappraisal of the Nigerian pamphlets known as 'Onitsha market literature', and focusing on non-elite authors, the author examines hitherto neglected genres, styles, languages, and, crucially, readerships. She shows how local print cultures permeated African literary production, charting changes in literary tastes and transformations to genres and styles, as they absorbed elements of globally circulating English texts into formats for local consumption. Offering fresh trajectories for thinking about local and transnational African literary networks while remaining attuned to local textual cultures in contexts of colonial power relations, anticolonial nationalism, the Cold War and global circuits of cultural exchange, this important book reveals new insights into ephemeral literature as significant sites of literary production, and contributes to filling a gap in scholarship on colonial West Africa.
Stephanie Newell is George M. Bodman Professor of English at Yale University. Her works include Histories of Dirt in West Africa: Media and Urban Life in Colonial and Postcolonial Lagos (2020) and The Power to Name: A History of Anonymity in Colonial West Africa (2013), finalist for the ASA Best Book Prize 2014.