The network brings together scholars who situate themselves at the intersection of postcolonial studies and literatures, book and art history, print and material cultures who work in/on a broad spectrum of languages, contexts and media.

It aims at developing a comparative and transnational framework to understand how genres, forms and actors long considered ‘footnotes of literary history’ – the ephemeral non-canonical forms, genres and formats such as little magazines, periodicals and newspapers, tv and radio broadcasts, drafts, pamphlets, advertising material etc. – have in fact been instrumental to the development of postcolonial literary cultures, instrumental forces of postcolonial and decolonial struggles, and sites of North/South and South/South transnational exchanges.

While developing scholarship on the hybrid, plural nature of so many of these archives (especially their engagement with oral and visual forms; with multilingual, translational practices; with pratices of performance) and increasing understanding of the cultural history of postcolonial societies, the network’s wider academic importance lies in rethinking the frontiers of the literary – in part by yielding new insights into the ways by which our conception of literature is shaped culturally and historically, and shaped by the conditions of its production.

We have identified the 5 following research clusters:

I. Archives: Mapping and theorizing Postcolonial Print Culture Archives and their ‘Digital Afterlives’

II. Postcolonial Print Cultures and the Anthropocene

III. Law and Print: Copyright, censorship and piracy

IV. Cold War, Decolonization and Genealogies of Literary Activism

V.  Visual Print Culture: Text and Image in Postcolonial Contexts