The legal publishing industry in Africa campaigns to convince people to scorn pirates and plagiarists as a criminal underclass, and to instead purchase copyrighted, barcoded works that have the look of legitimacy about them. This Element is a study of the emergence of new forms of reading in English in African cities.
Focusing on its literary programming in particular, this study of UNESCO shines a light on the close relationship between state-backed economic development and the global postwar cultural policy establishment.
This is the first book to consider what ideas about the creative economy derive from historic conceptions of the work of literary authorship and the first to discuss what writers make of the placement of their work in instrumental service of the creative economy.