Preventing ‘world literature’? Keeping African language literatures local

Creative writing authored and published in African languages has been positioned out of the line of sight of world literary studies and prevented from exerting an active presence in a literary system beyond its own. This article addresses why through a highly focused and detailed “biography” of the first published Igbo language novel Omenuko, which was published in book form in 1935 but only in English translation in 2014. Demonstrating how African language writing has been yoked to pre-ordained reading communities and locations because of constraints associated with the material book, this article moves across colonial prize cultures, orthography and book production, publishing institutions and economic markets, licit and illicit versions of the text. It models how a politically revitalised set of book history methods challenges the idealism and materialism driving theories of world literature by providinge alternative routes to effaced language sources .