The Book in Africa: Critical Debates
- Submitting institution
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The Open University
- Unit of assessment
- 27 - English Language and Literature
- Output identifier
- 1452403
- Type
- B - Edited book
- DOI
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-
- Publisher
- Palgrave Macmillan
- ISBN
- 9781137401618
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- January
- Year of publication
- 2015
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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1
- Research group(s)
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-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- The Book in Africa. Critical Debates is the first book-length publication focussed specifically on this topic. Johnson, together with Davis, was responsible for the collection’s conceptualisation, organisation and publication. This collection presents new research in African book history, bringing together different disciplinary perspectives by leading scholars. It includes case studies from across Africa – Morocco to South Africa, Ethiopia to Cameroon – and from third-century manuscript traditions to twenty-first century internet communications. In all the chapters, the individual case studies are framed in relation to critical debates in African book history. This collection transforms the understanding of the book in Africa by focusing upon the variety of cultural, political, and economic histories of books in Africa. Johnson co-authored (50%) the Introduction (5,593 words); co-edited (50%) the volume (104,346 words); and was sole author (100%) of the chapter, ‘Print culture and imagining the Union of South Africa’ (9,619 words). Johnson’s chapter is based on primary material held at the University of Witwatersrand; the University of Cape Town; the Western Cape Archives; and the National Library of South Africa. The Book in Africa has been extensively reviewed (Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Textual Cultures [TC], Journal of Southern African Studies [JSAS], and The African Book Publishing Record ) with reviewers consistent in their praise: Bower in TC hails the collection as ‘an important volume because it directs our attention to difficult questions [and] valuable to the fields of book history and postcolonial studies’; and Mkhize in JSAS applauds the collection’s achievement in ‘providing new, alternative perspectives on the politics of the printing and publication of books, thereby dispelling some of the (largely colonial) myths of the bifurcation of Africa as pre-literate and oral and Europe as literate’. By December 2020, The Book in Africa had sold 1678 copies in print and eBook forms.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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