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This book offers a compelling new approach to African literatures as formed by and itself a form of collective memory. It explores the historical spaces and maps that African literature brings to the surface and re-imagines in novel ways. The stories that matter about what happened in the past together constitute a collective memory that African writers and readers draw upon to locate themselves within the world. The book examines the mental maps that define the imaginative fields in which African literary texts have meaning. They provide answers to the questions that producers of texts must respond to: where stories are set, who writers write for, why writers write and how texts engage in meaning-making. It grapples with how writers imagine themselves contributing to a literary historiography and how readers get to understand the context within which texts are produced.
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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