Paru récemment The Arts and Crafts of Literacy. Islamic Manuscript Cultures in Sub-Saharan Africa sous la direction d’Andrea Brigaglia et Mauro Nobili chez De Gruyter

Paru récemment The Arts and Crafts of Literacy. Islamic Manuscript Cultures in Sub-Saharan Africa sous la direction d’Andrea Brigaglia et Mauro Nobili chez De Gruyter, coll. "Studies in Manuscript Cultures" (n° 12), 2017, X-367 p. ISBN : 978-3-11-054140-3 Prix : 109,95 € (existe aussi en version électronique).
Les versions électroniques (epub et pdf) sont téléchargeables gratuitement (en open access).

"During the last two decades, the (re-)discovery of thousands of manuscripts in different regions of sub-Saharan Africa has questioned the long-standing approach of Africa as a continent only characterized by orality and legitimately assigned to the continent the status of a civilization of written literacy.
However, most of the existing studies mainly aim at serving literary and historical purposes, and focus only on the textual dimension of the manuscripts. This book advances on the contrary a holistic approach to the study of these manuscripts and gather contributions on the different dimensions of the manuscript, i.e. the materials, the technologies, the practices and the communities involved in the production, commercialization, circulation, preservation and consumption.
The originality of this book is found in its methodological approach as well as its comparative geographic focus, presenting studies on a continental scale, including regions formerly neglected by existing scholarship, provides a unique opportunity to expand our still scanty knowledge of the different manuscript cultures that the African continent has developed and that often can still be considered as living traditions. "

Andrea Brigaglia is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Religious Studies, University of Cape Town and the director of the Centre for Contemporary Islam. He received his PhD from the Univer-sità degli Studi di Napoli ‘L’Orientale’, with a dissertation on Quranic exegesis (tafsīr) in northern Nigeria. He has published several articles on various aspects of the Islamic religious culture of northern Nigeria, including Quranic exegesis, Hausa and Arabic religious poetry, and Arabic calligraphy.
Mauro Nobili is Assistant Professor in African History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Cham-paign. He is also Honorary Research Associate at the Tombouctou Manuscripts Project, Huma, University of Cape Town. He is a specialist of West African History and his research focuses on Arabic manuscript culture and Islam in Africa. He published the Catalogue des manuscrits arabes du fonds de Gironcourt (Afrique de l’Ouest) de l’Institut de France (Rome : Istituto per L’Oriente C.A. Nallino, 2013) as well as several articles on the Arabic script styles in West African manu-scripts and on the Timbuktu chronicles. He is currently working on a book on the Tārīkh al-Fattāsh and the Caliphate of Ḥamdallāhi.