The Work of Repetition in 1960s Nigerian Epistolary Pamphlets

Abstract

ABSTRACT Nigerian epistolary pamphlets in the 1960s contained large quantities of reprinted material from globally circulating publications dating back to the early nineteenth century. Anachronistic English templates were offered to readers as models for copying in their own correspondence. This article argues that even when local authors copied English sources verbatim, they manifested anything but a passive duplication of metropolitan texts. Their relationship to anglophone materials was more complicated than allowed for by the category of plagiarism. A neglected trajectory of world literature can be opened up by the study of repetition and copying. In postcolonial contexts where emerging social classes sought empowerment through the production of writing in English, the layering and juxtaposition of diverse source materials in epistolary pamphlets presents a challenge to the linear, evolutionary timelines through which national literary-development and literary success or failure are often judged by scholars.