Much Matter in a Penny Paper

Karin Barber is an emeritus professor of African cultural anthropology at the University of Birmingham. Her research focuses on Yoruba oral literature, popular theater and print culture, and the comparative study of popular culture and textual production across Africa. Her book Print Culture and the First Yoruba Novel helped contribute to new interest in African-language print culture.

"Much Matter in a Penny Paper will shake up what is known and how it is known in Yorùbá studies, African studies, and histories of cultural formations in postcolonial studies. Only Professor Karin Barber could have written this compelling study of how an auspiciously positioned technology, placed in the hands of equally well-positioned individuals, fostered the making of the formidable early twentieth century Yorùbá language literary institutions." - Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ́, author of Arts of Being Yorùbá: Divination, Allegory, Tragedy, Proverb, Panegyric "Karin Barber takes us onto the streets of the fast-paced, expanding city of Lagos in the 1920s. She maps the city’s dynamic print cultures and brings to life the energetic Yoruba newspapermen-personalities each and every one-as they zig-zagged between Yorùbá and English, translating across languages and cultures while innovating with genres and relishing the linguistic experimentation made possible by their printing presses." - Stephanie Newell, author of The Power to Name: A History of Anonymity in Colonial West Africa "A rare and exceptional book. It succeeds in the difficult task of capturing the numerous moving dimensions of the Yoruba print world, driven as much by entrepreneurialism as philanthropy. Most impressively it captures the movement, vitality, exuberance, and energy of this world as a plethora of everyday forms were taken up experimentally in newspapers and publications. These themes gain further depth and resonance from a detailed picture of Lagos and its various social layers, contradictions and fault-lines. It was an utter joy to read." - Isabel Hofmeyr, author of Gandhi's Printing Press: Experiments in Slow Reading "Beautifully written, rigorously researched, and theoretically sophisticated, Much Matter in a Penny Paper is another triumph from a scholar who knows more about the history of African print culture than anyone alive." - Saheed Aderinto, author of Animality and Colonial Subjecthood in Africa: The Human and Nonhuman Creatures of Nigeria

• List of IllustrationsPrefaceAbbreviationsNote on Yoruba OrthographyIntroduction The Printing Press Arrives in LagosChapter 1 A Generative Context: Lagos in the 1920sChapter 2 Producing PrintChapter 3 Personalities, Publics, and Plots Chapter 4 Inventing GenresChapter 5 Two Works of FictionChapter 6 Translating and InterpretingChapter 7 The Animation of the PastChapter 8 Schools and SchoolbooksChapter 9 Ethnography in the ArchiveNotesReferencesIndex