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Reasons for reading in postcolonial Zambia

Reasons for reading in postcolonial Zambia
Reasons for reading in postcolonial Zambia
Built around a discussion of two interconnected case studies, the article seeks to help pave the way for a systematic study of a national literary tradition whose presence in the world literary space may be described as spectral. Through a discussion of a critically neglected Zambian literary archive from the 1960s and 1970s, and a survey of reading habits conducted in a Lusaka bookshop in 2010, it argues that Zambia’s postcolonial literature in English embodies what may be called a literariness of crisis, in which books are a desirable and valued but scarce social good; and that such sociopolitical conditions have been productive of a specific kind of local genre competence which may, in turn, be tied to a certain configuration of flexible and economical local ways of reading.
1744-9855
497-511
Primorac, Ranka
8e175d18-8ea8-4228-8637-671427202b10
Primorac, Ranka
8e175d18-8ea8-4228-8637-671427202b10

Primorac, Ranka (2012) Reasons for reading in postcolonial Zambia. Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 48 (5), 497-511. (doi:10.1080/17449855.2012.720833).

Record type: Article

Abstract

Built around a discussion of two interconnected case studies, the article seeks to help pave the way for a systematic study of a national literary tradition whose presence in the world literary space may be described as spectral. Through a discussion of a critically neglected Zambian literary archive from the 1960s and 1970s, and a survey of reading habits conducted in a Lusaka bookshop in 2010, it argues that Zambia’s postcolonial literature in English embodies what may be called a literariness of crisis, in which books are a desirable and valued but scarce social good; and that such sociopolitical conditions have been productive of a specific kind of local genre competence which may, in turn, be tied to a certain configuration of flexible and economical local ways of reading.

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Published date: 2012
Organisations: Faculty of Humanities

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 344780
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/344780
ISSN: 1744-9855
PURE UUID: f642dc6e-26f6-4771-94b9-56736e914ea7
ORCID for Ranka Primorac: ORCID iD orcid.org/0000-0003-1127-1175

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Date deposited: 01 Nov 2012 15:52
Last modified: 15 Mar 2024 03:33

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