Serial cultures of print and photography in West Africa Histories of print culture in West Africa have often unsettled the paradigms of production and circulation made familiar by scholarship on print culture in other geographic and (geo)cultural sites and spaces. The practices of reading, writing, collective or collaborative literacy, audience participation, and DIY publication that have been vital to the emergence and critical elucidation of West African print cultures have yet to be adequately accounted for within the dominant theoretical frames, as work by scholars such as Karin Barber, Stephanie Newell, Onookome Okome, and Tsitsi Jaji has brilliantly demonstrated. 2 Important to underscore in a comparative (non-Africanist) context, this and other recent research on African print cultures, sited both in West Africa and in other parts of the continent, has worked to undo long-standing assumptions about print’s status as a cultural praxis associated exclusively with urban elites in colonial and postcolonial space and has located print, instead, squarely within the arena of popular culture. Barber’s research in particular has been instrumental in charting an explosion of printed matter that was produced and circulated not only by elites “but also by non-elites or obscure aspirants to elite status” – to such a degree that “local, small-scale print production became a part of social life” in urban West Africa. 3 Print’s tran- scendence of communities defned by, and confned to, certain types of formal education (almost always in the colonial language) and associated literacies has reshaped our understanding of the relationships between print culture, European colonization, and local experiences of industrialization in colonial Africa. It has also cleared the way for new conceptualizations of both printed matter and popu- lar culture and new theorizations of their role in processes and experiences of decolonization and in the formation of the postcolonial state. 4 Much of this research has argued for a signifcant expansion of the very concept of printed matter in West Africa, redefning the “matter” of print culture to encom- pass domains extending far beyond those of literature, newspapers, or magazines and illuminating the complex interweaving of print technologies and printed objects with other popular cultural practices, media, and expressive forms. 5 Thus, West African print cultures have been shown by scholars such as Till Förster, Olu- bukola Gbadegesin, Achille Mbembe, John Picton, Kerstin Pinther, Ato Quayson, Analog and digital Nigeria Inheriting serial cultures in the work of Kelani Abass 1 Jennifer Bajorek 1 Forbes, M. (Ed.). (2019). International perspectives on publishing platforms : Image, object, text. Taylor & Francis Group. Created from cwidaho on 2022-01-12 18:33:36. Copyright © 2019. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.