The Bloomsbury Handbook of Postcolonial Print Cultures

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 This volume examines the published and unpublished writing, magazines, pamphlets, paratexts, advertisements, cartoons, radio, and street art that serve as the intellectual forces behind opposition to colonial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.>

List of contents

Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
Notes on Contributors

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

Section 1: Newspapers, Magazines and Periodicals
1. Aakriti Mandhwani, Shiv Nadar University, “Communism, Congress and the Early Cold War: A Perspective from Late 1940s Magazines”
2. Laetitia Zecchini, CNRS, Paris and Boston University, “Postcolonial Little Magazines in India: ‘Signatures of Dissent’ and Worldliness”
3. Chana Morgenstern, University of Cambridge, “A People’s Literature of Palestine/Israel: Socialist Realism and the Internationalist Cultural Journal (1950s-60s)”
4. Francesca Orsini, SOAS, University of London, “A Magazine for Everyone: The Ecology of Postcolonial Indian Magazines”
5. Isabel Hofmeyr, New York University and University of the Witwatersrand, “The Politics of the Page: Tracking Print Culture in African Studies”
6. Saronik Bosu, New York University, “The Print Cultural Formations of the Bhoodan Movement”

Section 2: Publishing, Editing and Textual Production
7. Sarah Brouillette, Carleton University, “Reading OkadaBooks”
8. Hala Halim, New York University, “A Commune of Letters; or, Anthologizing Afro-Asian Poetry”
9. Paulo Horta, New York University, “‘The Most Secret Memory of Men’: Global South Print Culture Between Bolaño and Mbougar Sarr”
10. Sara Marzagora, King’s College, London, “The Emperor, the intellectuals and the press: print culture and class formation in Ethiopia (1940s-1960s)”
11. Tanya Agathocleous, Hunter College and CUNY, “Censorship, Disaffection, and the Imperial Public Sphere”
12. Gail Low, University of Dundee, “Words and Money? Towards a Gift Economy of Exchange”

Section 3: Visual Print Cultures
13. Charles Forsdick, University of Liverpool, “Graphic Histories of the Haitian Revolution”
14. Emily Hyde, Rowan University, “Denis Williams at Midcentury: Global Modernism and the Book Form”
15. Binita Mehta, Manhattanville College, “Graphic Memoirs: Voices of the ‘Other’ in Text and Image”
16. Emily Sibley, Whitman College, “Protest, Street Art, and the Archive”
17. Neelam Srivastava, Newcastle University, “Archive Aesthetics: Zarina Bhimji’s Poetics of Print, Sound and Vision”

Section 4: Archives
18. Rochona Majumdar, University of Chicago, “Film Society Journals: Ephemeral Archives of Unrealized Futures”
19. Christi Merrill, University of Michigan, “The Metaphorics of Ambedkarite Archives: Vexing ‘modes of association’ in Digital Translation Works”
20. Sarah Rahman Niazi, University of Westminster, “Disciplining Cinema Through Akhlaq: An Urdu Text on Early Cinematic Practice in India”
21. Joseph Slaughter, Columbia University, “Recirculation: Plagiarism and the Print Life of Oral Tradition”
22. Elizabeth Holt, Bard College, “Resistance Literature, Occupied Palestine, and Mao”

Section 5: Literary and Political Networks
23. Supriya Chaudhuri, Jadavpur University, “Adda into Print: Cosmopolitan Sociability and Literary Networks”
24. Rossen Djagalov, New York University, “Premature Postcolonialists: The Afro-Asian Writers Association (1958–1991)”
25. Anjali Nerlekar, Rutgers University, “Textual Solidities and Solidarities: Namdeo Dhasal, Chandrakant Patil, and the Marathi/Hindi Literary World”
26. Jack Webb, University of Manchester, “Settlement and Struggle: Caribbean Print Cultures in Britain, 1958–1985”
27.Christian Høgsbjerg, University of Brighton, “‘Writers in a Common Cause’? Militant Pan-Africanist Print Culture in Imperial Britain”

Afterword
28. Stephanie Newell, Yale University, “The Temporalities of Postcolonial Print”

Index

About the author

Toral Jatin Gajarawala is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at New York University, USA, and the author of Untouchable Fictions: Literary Realism and the Crisis of Caste (2013). Her research areas include postcolonial theory, South Asian studies, aesthetic theory, caste and Dalit studies, the novel and narrative.

Neelam Srivastava is Professor of Postcolonial and World Literature at Newcastle University, UK. She is the co-founder of the Postcolonial Print Cultures Network, which has to date organised six international conferences. She is the author of Italian Colonialism and Resistances to Empire, 1930-1970 (2018) and has published widely on postcolonial Indian literature, anticolonial publishing, and Italian colonial/postcolonial cultures.

Rajeswari Sunder Rajan is a Visiting Professor at Ashoka University, India. She was Global Distinguished Professor of English at New York University, USA, until 2021.

Jack Webb is Research Associate in Postcolonial Print Cultures at Newcastle University, UK. He is the author of Haiti in the British Imagination, 18476-1915 (2020), which explores the early circulation of postcolonial texts in the Atlantic World, and of several articles on the history of Haiti and the British Empire. He administers the Postcolonial Print Cultures Network.

Summary

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.

Foreword

Reflecting the diversity of postcolonial print cultures, this book examines the cultural output that serve as the intellectual forces behind opposition to colonial orders.

Product details

• Authors: Toral Jatin Gajarawala, Rajan, Neelam Srivastava
• Assisted by: Toral Jatin Gajarawala (Editor), Rajeswari Sunder Rajan (Editor), Neelam Srivastava (Editor)
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 07.09.2023
• EAN: 9781350261754
• ISBN: 978-1-350-26175-4
• No. of pages: 528
• Series: Bloomsbury Handbooks
• Subject: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > Other languages / Other literatures