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Introduction: Colonial Public Spheres and the Worlds of Print

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 October 2020

Emma Hunter  and
Leslie James
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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
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Research Institute for History, Leiden University

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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.

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