Notes Introduction 1. See James Currey, Africa Writes Back: The African Writers Series and the Launch of African Literature (Oxford: James Currey, 2008), Appendix ‘1962–2003: African Writers Series by Year of Publication’, pp. 301–10. 2. Hans M. Zell and Helene Silvers, A Reader’s Guide to African Literature (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1972). This contains a bibliography of African literature published before 1972, from which this list of publishers is drawn. 3. Elleke Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 184. 4. Juliet Gardiner, ‘What is an Author? Contemporary Publishing Discourse and the Author Figure’, Publishing Research Quarterly 16:1 (2000), p. 67. 5. For example, Alan Hill’s account of Heinemann Educational, In Pursuit of Publishing (London: John Murray, 1988), Philip Wallis’s history of Longman, At the Sign of the Ship (Harlow: Longman, 1974), Peter Sutcliffe’s The Oxford University Press: An Informal History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), as well as publishers’ memoirs, such as David Philip, ‘Book Publishing under and after Apartheid’, in Book Publishing in South Africa for the 1990s: Proceedings of a Symposium Held at the South African Library, Cape Town, 22–23 November 1990 (Cape Town: South African Library, 1991). 6. Charles Larson, The Ordeal of the African Writer (London: Zed, 2001), p. 71. 7. Phaswane Mpe, ‘The Role of the Heinemann African Writers Series in the Develop- ment and Promotion of African Literature’, African Studies, 58 (1999), pp. 105–22. 8. Hans Zell, ‘Publishing in Africa’, unpublished paper, Oxford Brookes University Library Special Collection on African Publishing, c. 1992, p. 8. 9. Chinweizu, Jemie Onwuchekwa and Madubuike Ihechukwu, Toward the Decolonization of African Literature: African Fiction and Poetry and their Critics (London: KPI, 1980), pp. 16 and 7. 10. Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Class, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1992), p. 45. 11. D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (London: British Library, 1986), and Jerome McGann, The Textual Condition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991). 12. Robert Darnton, ‘What is the History of Books’, in The Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections in Cultural History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), pp. 107–36. 13. The study of African readers and reading communities is an important and expanding field of study that has been significantly shaped by recent schol- arship; for example: Isabel Hofmeyr’s The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of the Pilgrim’s Progress (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); Stephanie Newell’s Literary Culture in Colonial Ghana: ‘How to Play the Game of Life’ (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002) and West African Literatures: Ways of Reading (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Karin Barber (ed.), Africa’s Hidden Histories: Everyday Literacy and Making the Self (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006); and Archie Dick’s The Hidden History of South Africa’s Book and Reading Cultures (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012). 197 198 Notes to Introduction 14. Sarah Brouillette, Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 3. 15. See David Johnson, Shakespeare and South Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 90–7. 16. Ngu˜gı˜ wa Thiong’o, Penpoints, Gunpoints and Dreams: Towards a Critical Theory of the Arts and the State in Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 17. Chidi Amuta, The Theory of African Literature: Implications for Practical Criticism (London: Zed Books, 1989), pp. 2–3, 29, 34–6. 18. Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. Debevoise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 208. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid., p. 209. 21. Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 54. 22. Brouillette, Postcolonial Writers, pp. 7 and 175. 23. See Pierre Bourdieu, ‘The Production of Belief’, in The Field of Cultural Production, ed. Randal Johnson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993), pp. 103–5, for a discussion of the role of the publisher in ‘consecrating’ literature. 24. See Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. Susan Emanuel (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), pp. 142–6, for a general examination of the institutions of publishing and the different fields of cultural production, and Bourdieu, Field of Cultural Production, pp. 36–7 for an explanation of the role of the publisher in the symbolic production of a work of literature. 25. Casanova, World Republic of Letters, p. 39. 26. Shafquat Towheed, ‘Two Paradigms of Literary Production: The Production, Circulation and Legal Status of Rudyard Kipling’s Departmental Ditties and Indian Railway Library Texts’, in Books without Borders, vol. II: Perspectives from South Asia, ed. Robert Fraser and Mary Hammond (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 133. This study identifies the existence of a ‘segregated readership’ in colonial India, in which new Indian readers were widely ignored by authors, for example Rudyard Kipling. 27. See Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 3 and 16. 28. Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic, pp. 53 and 54. 29. James English, The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards and the Circulation of Cultural Value (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 298. 30. Casanova, World Republic of Letters, pp. 115 and 119. 31. Brouillette, Postcolonial Writers, p. 58. 32. Nourdin Bejjit, ‘The Publishing of African Literature: Chinua Achebe, Ngu˜gı˜ wa Thiong’o and the Heinemann African Writers Series, 1962–1988’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Open University (2009). 33. Previous studies of Three Crowns are my own history of the series ‘Postcolonial Publishing: Oxford University Press and the Three Crowns Series, 1962–1976’ pub- lished in Book History (2005), my Ph.D. thesis, ‘Postcolonial Literary Publishing: Oxford University Press in Africa and the Three Crowns Series’ (Open University, 2010), and Gail Low’s informative chapter on the series in Publishing the Postcolonial: West African and Caribbean Writing in the UK, 1950–1967 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), pp. 26–57. 34. Janice Radway, A Feeling for Books: The Book- of- the- Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle- Class Desire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), p. 76. Notes to Chapter 1 199 35. Bourdieu, Rules of Art, p. 142. 36. See Radway, Feeling for Books for a detailed examination of the relationship between cultural and economic capital in publishing with respect to the US Book- of- the- Month Club. 37. The relationship between Oxford University Press and Oxford University will be explained in Chapter 1, p. 19. 38. E. C. Parnwell, report to the OUP, 25 September 1932, ‘The Biological Approach to Education’, Africa and India Branch Books (1927–35), File: IB/14, Archives of Oxford University Press (henceforth cited as AOUP). Access to the archive was kindly provided by Dr Martin Maw, OUP Archivist. There is a 30-year embargo on access to archival documents, so files up to 1982 were consulted for this research. All archival references and quotations are reprinted by permission of the Secretary to the Delegates of Oxford University Press. 39. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1994), pp. 158–9. 40. ‘Publisher’s Speech at the Warehouse Opening’, 14 October 1970, West Africa Branch, Ibadan, Nigeria Misc., 286/322, AOUP. 41. Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 82. 42. Collings to Neale, 24 June 1962, Three Crowns Series, 1967–71, LG29/221–1, AOUP. 43. Collings to Neale, 4 July 1962, Soyinka: Lion and the Jewel, OP1619/12161, AOUP. 44. It should also be noted that my enquiry is confined to a study of the African branches of OUP and the Three Crowns archival records: it does not encompass the African Studies list of the Clarendon Press in London, or the parallel series entitled the Oxford Library of African Literature, which was a series of literature with an anthropological tendency – including African folklore, mythology and oral literature – that was translated into English and published from Oxford. 45. It is archival policy to remove records of rejected manuscripts; the archive does not retain author manuscripts or typescripts and so it is not possible to chart the transition of manuscript to final published book; jacket designs and page proofs are not retained; and, in addition, several editorial files are missing and some correspondence has gone astray. 46. Ann Laura Stoler, ‘Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance: On the Content in the Form’, in Francis X. Blouin Jr and William G. Rosenberg (eds), Archives, Documentation, and Institutions of Social Memory: Essays from the Sawyer Seminar (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), p. 269. 47. Stoler, ‘Colonial Archives’, p. 272. Note that Antoinette Burton uses similar terms to describe the task facing the historian in reading ‘backstage of archives’: Antoinette Burton (ed.), Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions and the Writing of History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), p. 6. 1 The Vision for OUP in Africa 1. Parnwell to Sisam, 19 October 1928, p. 9, South Africa Branch, 165 (1) AOUP. 2. Jenny Lee, ‘Exploiting the Imprint’, in David Carter and Anne Galligan (eds), Making Books: Contemporary Australian Publishing (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2007), p. 26. 3. See Graeme Johanson, Colonial Editions in Australia, 1843–1972 (Wagga Wagga: Elibank Press, 2000), p. 1. 4. Priya Joshi, In Another Country: Colonialism, Culture and the English Novel in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), pp. 98 and 102. 200 Notes to Chapter 1 5. See Rimi B. Chatterjee, Empires of the Mind: A History of the Oxford University Press in India under the Raj (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006), chap. 1 (pp. 17–44) for an informative overview of the background to the establishment of the India publishing programme and an overview of the work of the branches in India in the first half of the twentieth century.