The The Power to Name: A History of Anonymity in Colonial West Africa (New African Histories) - Softcover

Newell, Stephanie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0821420321 ISBN 13: 9780821420324

Publisher: Ohio University Press, 2013

Synopsis

Between the 1880s and the 1940s, the region known as British West Africa became a dynamic zone of literary creativity and textual experimentation. African-owned newspapers offered local writers numerous opportunities to contribute material for publication, and editors repeatedly defined the press as a vehicle to host public debates rather than simply as an organ to disseminate news or editorial ideology. Literate locals responded with great zeal, and in increasing numbers as the twentieth century progressed, they sent in letters, articles, fiction, and poetry for publication in English- and African-language newspapers.
The Power to Name offers a rich cultural history of this phenomenon, examining the wide array of anonymous and pseudonymous writing practices to be found in African-owned newspapers between the 1880s and the 1940s, and the rise of celebrity journalism in the period of anticolonial nationalism. Stephanie Newell has produced an account of colonial West Africa that skillfully shows the ways in which colonized subjects used pseudonyms and anonymity to alter and play with colonial power and constructions of African identity.

About this title

About the Author

Stephanie Newell is a professor of English at the University of Sussex, UK, and the author of West African Literature: Ways of Reading, Literary Culture in Colonial Ghana, and Ghanaian Popular Fiction: How to Play the Game of Life.

Edition details

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0821420321
• ISBN 13: 9780821420324
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 248