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A Network of Copies: Transmission and Textual Variants of Manuscript Traditions from the J.W.T. Allen Collection (Dar es Salaam)
This article by Annachiara Raia appeared in Manuscript Cultures, which contains the proceedings of the workshop ‘One Text, Many Forms - A Comparative View of the Variability of Swahili Manuscripts’, held at the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures on 21 and 22 April 2017. The article examines what exactly ‘textual practices’ - such as transmission, collecting, copying, transliterating and translating a handwritten text - tell us about variability and adaptation and questions the idea of ‘one text - one original archetype’. The text that Raia refers to is the poem of Yusuf, a story that was inspired by earlier Muslim texts.
This article appeared in Manuscript Cultures No. 17, published by Universität Hamburg's Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures, 2021. ISSN: 1867-9617.
Date, time and location
02 February 2022
About the author(s) / editor(s)
Annachiara Raia has been University Lecturer in the LUCAS department of the Faculty of Humanities and at the African Studies Centre Leiden since March 2019. The main focus of her research is Swahili literature and, in particular, the Swahili adaptation of one of the most widely travelled stories of mankind, the Islamic Story of Joseph, Qiṣat Yūsuf). This has allowed her to study 18th- and 19th-century Swahili manuscripts and encouraged her inquiries into the intertextual relations between texts, authorship and authorial interventions.
Posted on 10 February 2022, last modified on 18 February 2022