Colonial and Postcolonial Print Mobilities: Black Periodicals and Local Publications, 1880-Present

This workshop will explore local and global networks of circulation for literary and political writing produced by black authors, editors and readers, and will showcase the rich resources in Newcastle University’s archives on black print networks in Africa, Britain and the Caribbean. We will look at how colonial-era networks were established locally and allowed the circulation of ideas about anti-colonialism and literary production through “print mobility,” that is, the dissemination of newspapers, magazines, and pamphlets across black transcontinental and transatlantic readerships.
Periodicals and pamphlets, with their wide circulation, were often subject to censorship (especially if they espoused anti-colonial ideas), but at the same time allowed for the creation of reading publics and counter-publics. At the core of our workshop is the question: to what extent should our understandings of black counter-publics, transcontinental networks, and “world” literatures more generally, be filtered through the prism of the “local”? We are interested in how diverse conceptualisations of political writing and “literary value” evolved in local contexts, and what happens to notions of literature when we ground them in the locales and ephemeral materiality of newsprint.