Jones similarly points to the elasticity with which Yoruba-language writers envi- saged their readerships. Ultimately, however, her analysis focuses on ‘the exuberant sociability’ (p. 104) of Yoruba travel writers, whose travelogues ‘depict their per- sonal and professional networks spreading across Nigerian space’ (p. 110). In the final chapters, Hlonipha Mokoena and Stephanie Newell develop these intriguing insights into ‘the specificity of printed subjectivities’ (p. 390). Mokoena explains how the Zulu author and printer Magema Fuze used writing ‘to ensure his posterity’ (p. 377), while Newell explores ‘various forms of printed memorialization’ in colonial West Africa, showing how they ‘helped to produce a person’ s life story, and thus actively contributed to the genre of biog- raphy’ (p. 414). The numerous images in this chapter reveal the visual impact of memorializing techniques. Similarly, Kelly Askew’ s chapter on ‘Everyday poetry’ in Swahili newspapers and that of Olubukola Gbadegesin on Yoruba photoplays are strengthened by the inclusion of images, allowing readers to appre- ciate the creative, innovative and experimental elements of newspapers. While it is not possible here to highlight the specific merits of each individual chapter, all are based on intensive engagement with, and sophisticated interpreta- tions of, African newspapers. The volume as a whole will be generative of new empirical and theoretical research, adding an important historical dimension to the explosion of scholarship on contemporary African media. Kate Skinner University of Birmingham k.a.skinner@bham.ac.uk doi:10.1017/S000197201800058X Nina Sylvanus, Patterns in Circulation: cloth, gender, and materiality in West Africa. Chicago IL and London: University of Chicago Press (hb US$90 – 978 0 226 39719 1; pb US$30 – 978 0 226 39722 1). 2016, 210 pp. Nina Sylvanus’ s excellent multi-layered trans-historical study of Togolese wax- print fabric (or pagne) interweaves the role of African women in postcolonial developments, on the one hand, with a timely intervention in the ‘China-in- Africa’ debates on the other. The cloth constitutes women’ s moveable wealth and is of social and aesthetic importance to them. Women, who work the value of cloth, are invested in it in multiple ways, having controlled its circulation in West Africa until Togo’ s liberalization under structural adjustment programmes. The latter created the opportunity for copied cloths from China to be introduced. As the media in Western countries rages over China’ s increasing capital ties with African countries, it is useful to revisit the long history of national marketplaces and capitalist accumulation in Africa in order to retain the African story that is constitutive of agency, as Sylvanus does in Patterns in Circulation. In the book, wax-print fabric is neither simply an artefact nor a commodity produced and con- sumed. What differentiates this book is that, while the content of pagne exposes internal relations and contradictions, its form is neither fixed nor stable. For a rela- tively short book, with an introduction, conclusion and five chapters, it abounds with stories carefully interwoven with theory. Chapter 1 uses the stories of two women preparing for celebrations – Atsoupi, for a wedding celebration, and Belinda, for a baptism – to illustrate how women, regardless of financial means, use pagne to construct particular self-images through the choice of pattern and colour as well as through sartorial tastes that include tailoring, accessories and orchestrated gendered bodily techniques. The 888 Book reviews use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0001972018000591 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 45.56.155.140, on 10 Nov 2018 at 01:23:14, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of