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1 results

  • Chapter 19 - Making Audiences

  • from Part IV - Worlds of Print
  • Edited by Stephanie Newell, Yale University, Karin Barber, University of Birmingham
  • Book:
    African Literature in Transition
    Published online:
    23 October 2025
    Print publication:
    06 November 2025, pp 374-391

  • Summary

    This chapter analyses the epistemological overhaul of genres and ideas of textuality that took place in Ethiopia between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, and that prepared the grounds for the rise of Amharic print culture. Gäbrä-Əgziabher Gila-Maryam is generally credited with producing the first Amharic newspaper. His poetic newssheets readapted the genre of the awaj, or imperial proclamation. Most of these newssheets were handwritten, but Gäbrä-Əgziabher also pioneered the use of print to clandestinely circulate a longer type of awaj in prose. Through an analysis of Gäbrä-Əgziabher’s genre innovations, the chapter argues that the emergence of print in Ethiopia should be understood as part of a broader transformation of the oral/written interface – itself a result of the resignification of notions of ‘the public’ in the context of the new global dimension of politics.