Generative Transcription: the Interview in post-WW2 Anglophone African Literary Culture

This article discusses the ways in which the interview form was deployed in the 1960s and 1970s as a means to engender and critique a pan-African Anglophone literary public within the context of decolonization. In so doing it argues that the transcribed interview becomes a troublesome signifier of the legacies of colonialism while also offering a generative means by which to constitute literary publics and models of authorship across a number of newly decolonized countries. To do so, the article draws on three collections: broadcast interviews produced by the BBC’s English-Language African Service with host Edward Blishen; broadcast interviews produced by the London-based Transcription Centre, an organization dedicated to promoting Anglophone African culture and funded by the CIA-backed Congress for Cultural Freedom; satirical interviews published over several issues of the leading little magazine of African arts and culture, Transition.