Heinemann’s AWS Archive and the Politics of Publishing Biafra
摘要
This chapter interrogates the archival and literary evidence of Heinemann’s minoritization of Biafran voices and the politicization of publishing them during the Nigeria-Biafra war. It argues that some significant publisher-author correspondences and unpublished materials reflecting the perspectives of Biafractivist authors, which are kept at the African Writers Series’ Archive at the University of Reading, are important research tools for engaging and reclaiming the perceived “rebel” authors’ voices and the publisher’s ambivalent circumstances during the war. Through a postcolonial reading theoretical strategy, and an archival-literary methodology, it teases out how these materials represent Biafrans as “outsiders within” Nigeria, and why Biafran voices fall through the cracks in the war’s historicity through an analysis of their experiences in selected documents and narratives on the Nigeria-Biafra War.