Print Culture and Colonisation in Africa
Colloquim
28-29 May 2015
HUMA Seminar Room, Upper Campus, UCT, Cape Town
Jointly hosted by the University of Pretoria and the University of Cape Town in collaboration with Oxford Brookes University and with funding from the British Academy.
The flow of technology, missionaries and merchants brought printing to African countries. The development of print culture was dispersed and intensified by the advent of colonisation. This twoday colloquium will focus on the interplay between colonial interventions and local textual cultures. Papers may explore the ways in which books and the book trade have been shaped by Africa’s colonial and postcolonial history, and how print cultures developed across the continent in the context of wide‑‑scale European colonisation. They may also consider the history of the book in the context of apartheid South Africa. ‘Colonisation’ may also be seen as an ongoing practice, and its power dynamics and implications for current print culture explored.