The Bloomsbury Handbook of Postcolonial Print Cultures

Toral Jatin Gajarawala, Neelam Srivastava, Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Jack Webb

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9781350261754
• eBook ISBN: 9781350261778
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: African Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The texts that make up postcolonial print cultures are often found outside the archival catalogue, and in lesser-examined repositories such as personal collections, the streets, or appendages to established collections. This volume examines the published and unpublished writing, magazines, pamphlets, paratexts, advertisements, cartoons, radio, and street art that serve as the intellectual forces behind opposition to colonial orders, as meditations on the futures of embryonic nation states, and as visions of new forms of equality.

The print cultures examined here are necessarily anti-institutional; they serve as a counterpoint to the colonial archive and, relatedly, to more traditional genres and text formats coming out of large-scale publishers. This means that much of the primary material analyzed in this book has not been scrutinized before. Many of these print productions articulate collective liberation projects with origins in the grassroots. They include debates around the shape of the postcolonial nation and the new state formation that necessarily draw on a diverse and contentious public sphere of opinion. Their rhetoric ranges from the reformist to the revolutionary.

Reflecting the diversity, indeed the disorderliness, of postcolonial print cultures this book covers local, national, and transnational cultures from Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas. Its wide-ranging essays offer a nuanced and, taken together, a definitive (though that is not to say comprehensive or systematic) study of a global phenomenon: postcolonial print cultures as a distinct literary field. The chapters recover the efforts of writers, readers and publishers to produce a postcolonialism 'from below', and thereby offer a range of fresh perspectives on the meaning and history of postcolonialism.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part One Newspapers, magazines and periodicals
• 1 Communism, congress and the Early Cold War: A perspective from late 1940s magazines
• 2 Postcolonial little magazines in India: ‘Signatures of dissent’ and worldliness
• 3 A people’s literature of Palestine/Israel: Arab socialist realism and the anticolonial cultural journal in the 1950s
• 4 A magazine for everyone: The ecology of postcolonial Indian magazines
• 5 The politics of the printed page: Tracking print culture in African studies
• 6 The print cultural formation of the Bhoodan Movement
• Part Two Publishing, editing and textual production
• 7 Reading OkadaBooks
• 8 A commune of letters; or, anthologizing Afro-Asian poetry
• 9 ‘The most secret memory of men’: Global south print culture between Bolaño and Mbougar Sarr
• 10 The emperor, the intellectuals and the press: Print culture and class formation in Ethiopia (1940s–1960s)
• 11 Censorship, disaffection and the imperial public sphere
• 12 Words and money? Towards a gift economy of exchange
• Part Three Visual print cultures
• 13 Graphic histories of the Haitian Revolution
• 14 Denis Williams at midcentury: Global modernism and the book form
• 15 Graphic memoirs: Voices of the ‘other’ in text and image
• 16 Protest, street art and the archive
• 17 Archive aesthetics: Zarina Bhimji’s poetics of print, sound and vision
• Part Four Archives
• 18 Film society journals: Ephemeral archives of unrealized futures
• 19 The metaphorics of Ambedkarite archives: Vexing ‘modes of association’ in digital translation works
• 20 Disciplining cinema through akhlāq: An Urdu text on early cinematic practice in India
• 21 Recirculation: Plagiarism and the print life of oral tradition
• 22 Resistance literature, Occupied Palestine and Mao
• Part Five Literary and political networks
• 23 Adda into print: Cosmopolitan sociability and literary networks
• 24 Premature postcolonialists: The Afro-Asian Writers Association (1958–1991)
• 25 Textual solidities and solidarities: Namdeo Dhasal, Chandrakant Patil and the Marathi/Hindi literary world
• 26 Settlement and struggle: Caribbean print cultures in Britain, 1958–1985
• 27 ‘Writers in a common cause’? Militant Pan-Africanist print culture in imperial Britain
• 28 Afterword: The temporalities of postcolonial print
• Index
• Copyright