This panel will revisit the institutional, political, and publishing environments of mid-twentieth-century anglophone literature in order to pose questions about the methods of literary studies today. In conversation with Nathan Suhr-Sytsma’s Poetry, Print, and the Making of Postcolonial Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2017), which uncovers a surprising history of relationships among poets and editors from Nigeria and Northern Ireland, as well as Britain and the Caribbean, roundtable participants will consider what we might yet learn from the era of decolonization. In brief position papers, participants will be encouraged to take up such questions as: How should we conceive of African literature in relationship to other regionally defined literary fields? How might we do justice to both national and transnational frames for literary history? What are the virtues and limits of literary biography—and historicist approaches, more generally—for African literature? What roles can scholarship about print play in the twenty-first century? Are new avenues for attending to poetry opening up within the field of African literature? Carli Coetzee (chair, SOAS) James Currey (publisher) Rotimi Fasan (Osun State University) Jarad Zimbler (U of Birmingham)