[Sugarman] CFP: African Print Cultures, 20-23 June 2016

[Derek Peterson]

Dear Wits and Michigan colleagues: 

Below is a CFP for a Mellon-funded workshop on ‘African Print Cultures’, to be held outside Johannesburg from 20 to 23 June 2016. This is intended to be quite a small-scale occasion. We are particularly interested in having proposals from graduate students who are working in (or are interested in working in) this area. 

Proposals are due to the addresses given below by Monday, 5 October 2015. 

Yours, 
Derek Peterson & Isabel Hofmeyr



** African Print Cultures **
20-23 June, 2015
Johannesburg, South Africa

Scholars have generally read newspapers as a conveyance for data or as an means by which to index the changing tides of public opinion. In this workshop we will engage with news-making as politically and culturally constitutive work. We want to bring into view the editors and publishers who financed the press, set agendas, and produced the news. In the absence of ready-made audiences, African editors had to create interest groups. They used the techniques of their trade—cutting-and-pasting, summarization, citation, excision, juxtaposition—to make connections and draw linkages. Newspapers were therefore the forcing-houses for new political solidarities. They were also the hosts for new forms of addressivity. They were the incubators for the creation of literary genres and the genesis of new African voices.   

Here we want to focus on the choices that editors made as they recruited audiences; on the itineraries that journalists embarked upon as they identified and composed news; on the literary experiments that newspapermen sponsored as they looked for new voices with which to speak. Our aim, collectively, is to develop a comparative approach to the history of newspaper journalism in Africa. We are particularly interested in mapping out the networks of textual exchange that linked southern Africa’s newspapers with newspapers in east and west Africa. 

Our starting-place will be a new book, shortly to appear on the University of Michigan Press, entitled _African Print Cultures: Newspapers and their Publics in the Twentieth Century_ (ed. Derek Peterson, Emma Hunter, and Stephanie Newell). The book largely focuses on the newspaper industries of Anglophone East and West Africa. In the workshop we hope to open up a comparative conversation about the newspaper industry in southern Africa. The following scholars have committed to attending this workshop: 

From Wits: Hlonipha Mokoena, Bhekizizwe Peterson, Brenda Mhlambi, & Isabel Hofmeyr
From U-M: Judy Irvine, Stephanie Santana-Bosch, Kelly Askew, & Derek Peterson
From UCT: Khwezi Mkhize
From the University of Pretoria: Corinne Sandwith & Archie Dick
From the United Kingdom: Karin Barber (Birmingham), Emma Hunter (Edinburgh) & Leslie James (Birmingham)

Participants will compose pre-circulated papers for discussion.  As one focus of the workshop is concerned with the materiality of print, we would encourage presenters to incorporate examples of pages and cuttings in their presentations.

We encourage graduate students and colleagues interested in participating in this occasion to submit a one-page proposal to us by Monday, 5 October 2015. 


Isabel Hofmeyr, <Isabel.Hofmeyr at wits.ac.za <mailto:Isabel.Hofmeyr at wits.ac.za>>
Derek Peterson, <drpeters at umich.edu <mailto:drpeters at umich.edu>>
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