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.
497-511
Primorac, Ranka
8e175d18-8ea8-4228-8637-671427202b10
2012
Primorac, Ranka
8e175d18-8ea8-4228-8637-671427202b10
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
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Local EPrints ID: 344780
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/344780
ISSN: 1744-9855
PURE UUID: f642dc6e-26f6-4771-94b9-56736e914ea7
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Date deposited: 01 Nov 2012 15:52
Last modified: 15 Mar 2024 03:33
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