Words of Paper. Materiality of Writing and its Discourses in African Contexts1

Abstract

Written supports have become a fully-fledged research subject. In themselves, as well as through their articulation with the sign or signs inscribed therein, they reveal complex discourses, practices and social interactions with vast temporal and geographical ramifications. The interest in written supports is part of the explosion of modes of materiality, in particular, the widespread use of devices for digitizing handwritten and printed textual resources on a global scale and the democratization of its consultation. Initiated some twenty years ago, 2 this movement has now reached a maturity that allows us to reflect not only on the materiality of scriptural documents, but also on the sensory relationship we have with these documents. Indeed, scriptural materiality is not only accessible through a codicological approach to physical media and its ownership. It must also be considered in terms of the sensitive and felt effects of the uses of a support. If, on one hand, the dematerialization resulting from the digitization of documents has revived questions about the physical processes of writing production, on the other, digital vectors and their on-screen display can also be considered as additional layers in the sensitive relationship between the reader and a text. Thus, digital forms of communication reorganize information, while adding new ones through the association and/or dissociation of forms and materials (Bonaccorsi 2013: 127). Therefore, it seemed appropriate to engage in a historical and anthropological reflection that does not start from the narrative content of the texts, but from their supports, in order to understand the societies that produce and receive these texts, but also our own relationship, as researchers, to the written object. 2 This reflection is the starting point of this special issue devoted to the materiality of writing in African contexts. It is part of the renewal of historical and anthropological studies on writing in Europe and, over the past twenty years, in Africa. In the aftermath of the archival shift from archive-source to archive-subject (Stoler 2018: 78, see also Words of Paper. Materiality of Writing and its Discourses in African Contexts Cahiers d'études africaines, 236 | 2019

The Materiality of the Archive: Creative Practice in Context

“…records should be understood as a kind of force -the record-ascommand -because they are able to achieve things in the world, as well as to represent things in the world, through what they say, if they endure and where they exist, and 'Enduring archival displacement is made possible by the archival colour line, just as it reinscribes that line on the world map, day after day' (Linebaugh and Lowry 2021). Such are the 'complex discourses, practices and social interactions with vast temporal and geographical ramifications' that Silvia Bruzzi and Rémi Dewière say written supports in 'themselves, as well as through their articulation with the sign or signs inscribed therein … reveal' (Bruzzi and Dewière 2019).…”