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 This volume examines the published and unpublished writing, magazines, pamphlets, paratexts, advertisements, cartoons, radio, and street art that serve as the intellectual forces behind opposition to colonial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

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 Global Distinguished Professor of English and New York University, USA.

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.