Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dzt6s Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-18T12:55:37.515Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Introduction: Colonial Public Spheres and the Worlds of Print

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 October 2020

Emma Hunter  and
Leslie James
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

A growing literature explores the varying role of print media in the colonial world and the new types of publics such newspapers and periodicals produced. However, this literature has tended to focus on specific regions, and has often sidestepped the larger question of how to conceptualise the relationship between print media and colonial rule. While some have used the term ‘colonial public sphere’ or ‘colonial publics,’ others have preferred to avoid these terms and instead thought in terms of multiple and overlapping publics. What this literature has shown is that a single analytic model for analysing public spaces of discourse is not usable. In this Introduction to our Special Issue we propose a new framework for studying the publics created through print media in the colonial world. We outline a set of four factors – addressivity, performativity, materiality and periodicity – that can be applied to specific historical case studies. We then explain how the issue as a whole models this methodology as a means to analyse how print media (as one medium within the public sphere) functioned in specific colonial and semi-colonial spaces around the world.

Keywords

Print mediapublic spherecolonial societyglobal publicscounterpublics
Type
Introduction
Information
Itinerario , Volume 44 , Special Issue 2: Colonial Public Spheres and the Worlds of Print , August 2020 , pp. 227 - 242
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Research Institute for History, Leiden University

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

•

Emma Hunter is Professor of Global and African History at the University of Edinburgh. She is the author of Political Thought and the Public Sphere in Tanzania: Freedom, Democracy and Citizenship in the Era of Decolonization, published by Cambridge University Press in 2015, and a co-editor, with Derek Peterson and Stephanie Newell, of African Print Cultures: Newspapers and their Publics in the Twentieth Century, published by the University of Michigan Press in 2016.

*

Leslie James is an historian of West African and Caribbean political and intellectual histories. Her book, George Padmore and Decolonization from Below: Pan-Africanism, the Cold War, and the end of empire (2015) shows how black thinkers stretched the category of ‘intellectual’ by melding their ideas, political organizing, and social community. Her next book examines how the circulation of ideas in the West African and Caribbean press played a constitutive role in the processes and outcomes of decolonisation.

References

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 2016.Google Scholar
Askew, Kelly. “Everyday Poetry from Tanzania: Microcosm of the Newspaper Genre.” In African Print Cultures: Newspapers and Their Publics in the Twentieth Century, edited by Peterson, Derek, Hunter, Emma, and Newell, Stephanie, 179–223. Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 2016.Google Scholar
Bakhtin, Mikhail. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987.Google Scholar
Ballantyne, Tony. “What Difference Does Colonialism Make?: Reassessing Print and Social Change in an Age of Global Imperialism.” In Agents of Change: Print Culture Studies after Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, edited by Baron, Sabrina Alcorn, Lindquist, Eric N., and Shevlin, Eleanor F., 342–52. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007.Google Scholar
Barber, Karin. The Anthropology of Texts, Persons and Publics: Oral and Written Culture in Africa and Beyond. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barber, Karin. Introduction to her Print Culture and the First Yoruba Novel, 1–75. Leiden: Brill, 2012.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bhattacharya, Neeladri. “Notes Towards a Conception of the Colonial Public.” In Civil Society, Public Sphere, and Citizenship: Dialogues and Perceptions, edited by Bhargava, Rajeev and Reifeld, Helmut, 130–56. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2005.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” In Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre, edited by Case, Sue-Ellen, 270–82. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990.Google Scholar
Calhoun, Craig. Habermas and the Public Sphere. London: MIT Press, 1992.Google Scholar
Carcia, José Luis, et al. Media and the Portuguese Empire. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2017.Google Scholar
Chartier, Roger. “Laborers and Voyagers: From the Text to the Reader.” Diacritics 22:2 (1992), 49–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cowling, Leslie, and Hamilton, Carolyn, “Producing Media Debate: Journalistic Practice and Public Discussion.” Ecquid Novi: African Journalism Studies 32:3 (2011), 45–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fraser, Nancy. “Transnationalizing the Public Sphere: On the Legitimacy and Efficacy of Public Opinion in a Post-Westphalian World.” Theory, Culture and Society 24:4 (2007), 7–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Frost, Mark Ravinder. “Asia's Maritime Networks and the Colonial Public Sphere, 1840–1920.” New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies 6:2 (2004), 63–94.Google Scholar
Green, Nile. “Spacetime and the Muslim Journey West: Industrial Communications in the Making of the ‘Muslim World.’” American Historical Review 118:2 (2013), 401–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Green, Nile. “Waves of Heterotopia: Toward a Vernacular Intellectual History of the Indian Ocean.” American Historical Review 123:3 (2018), 846–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Habermas, Jürgen. Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989.Google Scholar
Hofmeyr, Isabel. “Books in Heaven: Dreams, Texts and Conspicuous Circulation.” Current Writing 18:2 (2006), 136–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hofmeyr, Isabel. Gandhi's Printing Press: Experiments in Slow Reading. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hunt, Nancy Rose. A Nervous State: Violence, Remedies, and Reverie in Colonial Congo. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hunter, Emma. “Modernity, Print Media and the Middle Class in Colonial East Africa.” In The Global Bourgeoisie: The Rise of the Middle Classes in the Age of Empire, edited by Dejung, Christof, Motadel, David, and Osterhammel, Jürgen, 105–22. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2019.Google Scholar
James, Leslie. “The Flying Newspapermen and the Time-Space of Late Colonial Nigeria.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 60:3 (2018), 569–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kaul, Chandrika, ed. Media and the British Empire. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
La Vopa, Anthony J. “Conceiving a Public: Ideas and Society in Eighteenth-Century Europe.” Journal of Modern History 64:1 (1992), 79–116.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Leow, Rachel. Taming Babel: Language in the Making of Malaysia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Meyer, Birgit, ed. Aesthetic Formations: Media, Religion and the Senses. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nash, Kate. “Transnationalizing the Public Sphere: Critique and Critical Possibilities.” Theory, Culture and Society 24:4 (2007), 53–7.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Newell, Stephanie. The Power to Name: A History of Anonymity in Colonial West Africa. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2013.Google Scholar
Piccato, Pablo. “Public Sphere in Latin America: A Map of the Historiography.” Social History 35:2 (2010), 165–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Potter, Simon J. Broadcasting Empire: The BBC and the British World, 1922–1970. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Potter, Simon J. News and the British World: The Emergence of an Imperial Press System, 1876–1922. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wagner, Rudolf, ed. Joining the Global Public: Word, Image, and City in Early Chinese Newspapers, 1870–1910. New York: State University of New York Press, 2007.Google Scholar
Warner, Michael. “Publics and Counterpublics.” Public Culture 14:1 (2002), 49–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Winseck, Dwayne R., and Pike, Robert M.. Communication and Empire: Media, Markets, and Globalization, 1860–1930. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007.Google Scholar