Postcolonial Print Cultures and their Digital Afterlives: A Roundtable Discussion

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Postcolonial Print Cultures and their Digital Afterlives:
A Roundtable 
Discussion
Tuesday, 8 June 2021: 15:30 – 17:00
Speakers: Prof Neelam Srivastava,  
Dr Jack Webb and Dr Siddharth Soni
Chair: Prof Caroline Bassett
Print cultures have long played an important role in the development and dissemination of literatures in the global South, forging aesthetic and political affinities between languages, cultures, forms, and literary movements. Over the last decade, we have seen a renewed interest in the materiality of the postcolonial page—be it the book form or the more ephemeral media forms like magazines, textbooks, journals, newspapers, and pamphlets. Literary genres like the short story or popular verse, once considered peripheral, have now come back into critical view for the role they played in shaping anti-colonial and dissident movements and establishing significant South-South alliances.

Libraries, archives, and museums have responded to this renewal of academic interest in the ‘postcolonial material’ by turning to digital reproduction of these ephemeral print-media. Several initiatives—prominently among them the British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme (EAP)—are now turning to the ‘digital page’ in an attempt to re-disseminate and re-historicise these media through a networked digital practice. But what are the politics and ethics of this move? What are its critical implications for academic scholarship?

In this CDH Open Series, we are joined by Professor Neelam Srivastava (Newcastle University), Dr Jack Webb (Newcastle University) and Dr Siddharth Soni (University of Cambridge), to discuss the critical, ethical, and epistemological questions that arise from the study of a ‘print culture’ and its digital reproduction. The discussion will be chaired by Professor Caroline Bassett, Director of Cambridge Digital Humanities (CDH). The floor will be subsequently open to all attendees for questions.
About the Speakers
Prof Neelam Srivastava is the Professor of Postcolonial and World Literature at the Newcastle University. She is also the convenor of Postcolonial Print Cultures Research Network. Her books include Italian Colonialism and Resistances to Empire, 1930-1970 (2018) and Secularism in the Postcolonial Indian Novel (2007). She has co-edited critical volumes Indian Literature and the World: Multilingualism, Translation, and the Public Sphere (2017) and The Form of Ideology and the Ideology of Form: Print Cultures between Decolonisation and the Cold War (2021). She is currently working on A Handbook of Postcolonial Print Cultures (2022).
Dr Jack Webb is the author of Haiti in the British Imagination: Imperial Worlds, 1847-1915 (2020) and a co-editor of the volume Memory, Migration, and Decolonisation in the Caribbean and Beyond (2020). He is currently at Newcastle University where he is a co-convenor of the Postcolonial Print Cultures Research Network. He was previously a Lecturer in Modern British History at the University of Manchester.
Dr Siddharth Soni is the Isaac Newton Trust Research Fellow in Digital Humanities at the University of Cambridge. He is the lead convenor of the World Small Press Index Project, as well as the co-convenor of the Digital Afterlives Research Network at Cambridge Digital Humanities (CDH). He is currently writing a book-length history of the short story form in India.
Header Image: World Small Press Index Project, Screenshot 2020
This event is free, booking is now open on Eventbrite