Written culture in a colonial context : Africa and the Americas, 1500-1900 / / edited by Adrien Delmas, Nigel Penn.

• Superior document: African history ; v. 2
• TeilnehmendeR: Delmas, Adrien.; Penn, Nigel.
• Year of Publication: 2012
• Edition: 1st ed.
• Language: English
• Series: African history (Brill Academic Publishers) ; v. 2.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (411 p.)
• Notes: Papers first presented at a conference at the University of Cape Town in Dec. 2008.; Previously published: UCT Press, 2011.

Recent developments in the cultural history of written culture have omitted the specificity of practices relative to writing that were anchored in colonial contexts. The circulation of manuscripts and books between different continents played a key role in the process of the first globalization from the 16th century onwards. While the European colonial organization mobilised several forms of writing and tried to control the circulation and reception of this material, the very function and meaning of written culture was recreated by the introduction and appropriation of written culture into societies without alphabetical forms of writing. This book explores the extent to which the control over the materiality of writing has shaped the numerous and complex processes of cultural exchange during the early modern period.

Table of Contents

Foreword: Writing at Sea / Isabel Hofmeyr -- Introduction: the written word and the world / Adrien Delmas -- Rock art, scripts and proto-scripts in Africa: the Libyco-Berber example / Jean-Loïc Le Quellec -- From pictures to letters: the early steps in the Mexican tlahcuilo's alphabetisation process during the 16th century / Patrick Johansson -- Edmond R. Smith's writing lesson: archive and representation in 19th century Araucanía / André Menard -- Missionary knowledge in context: geographical knowledge of Ethiopia in dialogue during the 16th and 17th centuries / Hervé Pennec -- From travelling to history: an outline of the VOC writing system during the 17th century / Adrien Delmas -- Towards an archaeology of globalisation: readings and writings of Tommaso Campanella on a theological-political empire between the Old and the New worlds (16th-17th centuries) / Fabián Javier Ludueña Romandini -- Charlevoix and the American savage: the 18th-century traveller as moralist / David J. Culpin -- Written culture and the Cape Khoikhoi: from travel writing to Kolb's 'full description' / Nigel Penn -- Nothing new under the sun: anatomy of a literary-historical polemic in colonial Cape Town circa 1800-1910 / Peter Merrington -- Mapuche-Tehuelche Spanish writing and Argentinian-Chilean expansion during the 19th century / Julio Esteban Vezub -- To my dear minister: official letters of African Wesleyan evangelists in the late 19th-century Transvaal / Lize Kriel -- Literacy and land at the Bay of Natal: documents and practices across spaces and social economics / Mastin Prinsloo -- The 'painting' of Black history: the Afro-Cuban codex of José Antonio Aponte (Havana, Cuba, 1812) / Jorge Pavez Ojeda -- On not spreading the Word: ministers of religion and written culture at the Cape of Good Hope in the 18th century / Gerald Groenewald -- Occurrences and eclipses of the myth of Ulysses in Latin American culture / José Emilio Burucúa.