The Postcolonial Print Cultures (PPC) international research network was started in 2017 by Rajeswari Sunder Rajan (New York University) and Neelam Srivastava (Newcastle University). For a period of 4 years, and with the organization of regular conferences, it brought together international scholars working in the fields of postcolonial studies, book history, print cultures and digital humanities – who are interested in the production, circulation, and consumption of print as an agent in social, cultural, and political life as it relates to colonial contexts and anticolonial practices. Several publications came out of the research presented at the conferences of the network, including The Form of Ideology and the Ideology of Form: Cold War, Decolonization and Postcolonial Print Cultures (2022), Postcolonial Archives: Networks, Objects, Collaborations, Absences (2022), and the soon-to-be-published Bloomsbury Handbook of Postcolonial Print Cultures (2023).

In 2023, the network was revived by Laetitia Zecchini (CNRS) as the International Research Network on Postcolonial Print Cultures (IRNPPC) with funding from the CNRS for a period of 5 years, expanding and consolidating the initial PPC network by establishing institution-based collaborations between a diverse and global range of leading academic institutions and communities: the CNRS with two research centers (THALIM and ITEM); New York University and the University of Chicago in the United States; Jadavpur University and the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences (CSSS) in Calcutta, India; Newcastle University in the United Kingdom; the University of the  Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa; NYU-Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates.

This new international network builds on the focus of the earlier PPC network while also focusing on the following new research clusters:

– Archives: Mapping and theorizing Postcolonial Print Culture Archives and their ‘Digital Afterlives’

– Postcolonial Print Cultures and the Anthropocene

– Law and Print: Copyright, censorship and piracy

– Cold War, Decolonization and Genealogies of Literary Activism

– Visual Print Culture: Text and Image in Postcolonial Contexts

Over the 2023-2027 period, our network will hold yearly conferences in Paris, Calcutta, Chicago, Johannesburg and Newcastle, with a series of more localized workshops, and a bi-monthly seminar. More news to come!