Between African writers and Heinemann Educational Publishers: The political economy of a culture industry

The dissertation undertakes a new approach to the study of African literature, which it derives from the interdisciplinary field of enquiry associated first and foremost with Lucien Febvre and his l'histoire du livre (The History of the Book). It examines the role of media production technology, the impact of the printing industry, editorial theory and practice, the socio-economic dynamics of publishing, and the survival of books in relation to changes in social structure. It argues that we can understand the historical changes in the African world by reading those changes primarily through the prism of the history of literary production. By exploring the historical context for the emergence and decline of the African Writers Series, a series dedicated to the publication of African authors by the British publishing house of Heinemann Educational Books, the dissertation formulates a paradigm for understanding socio-historical changes in Africa. It demonstrates how knowledge of the historical and political contexts of the production of literature, the material life that publishers, authors and products inhabit, and the international and transcultural dynamics of production and transmission necessarily challenge the conventional understanding of literary texts.;The dissertation identifies the specific characteristics that the various markets in which the African Writers Series was circulated engendered in the texts. That is, how writing for an educational market, or general market, or even trade market affected the consciousness of the writers, and the dynamics and function of textual production. It posits that the worldliness of African literature as a product of dispersion and dissemination through international travel and marketing effectively ushers in a post-authenticity moment of African and Postcolonial literature that moves away from a culture-based to a market-based theory of literature. It performs a reading of literature by tracking author/publisher relations within the contexts of the production and reception and concludes by proposing the term international literature as a postcolonial re-appropriation of the Marxian appropriation of the term "world literature." Working from this theory of literary production, the thesis offers a fresh approach to canonical and non-canonical texts of modern African literature by writers such as Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, T.M Aluko, Thomas Akare, Ngugi wa Thiongo, Olaudah Equiano, among others.