Toward the Future Reader: Print Networks and the Question of the Audience

Benedict Anderson famously tied the spread of newspapers, novels, and vernacular language movements to the rise of nationalism. This chapter tells a very different story about the audiences that print cultures conjure. The years 1930–60 saw an explosion of periodicals in French West Africa. African newspapers developed a rich repertoire of strategies for cultivating their audiences and imagining alternative modes of relating to print besides silent, private reading. Contra Anderson, late colonial-era print networks did not always project audiences according to a nationalist model. Instead, many periodicals were oriented toward a figure this chapter calls the future reader--an elusive, virtual addressee just beyond the margins of existing print publics. After tracing the future reader across novels, newspapers, and more ephemeral print forms, this chapter argues that this figure has come to live on in vernacular literature movements, which continue to concern themselves with producing the readerships they seek to address.