On the Hospitality of Print: Ousmane Soce's Bingo and Its Publics

This essay explores an understudied aspect of print cultures in Africa and beyond. One affordance of print forms is their capacity to actively play host to a variety of ways of relating to the medium of print itself. This capacity is called here the hospitality of print--an affect of openness and invitation that suffuses certain print publics that solicit and accommodate disparate kinds of attention and use. This phenomenon is analyzed through a discussion of the early years of the glossy pan-African periodical Bingo. Launched in 1953 and published in Senegal and France under the editorial direction of Ousmane Soce, Bingo aimed for a mass audience across the Francophone world. Under Soce, Bingo made the printed page into a social space for its readers by opening itself up to multiple modes of engagement.
What kinds of audiences can a printed page conjure? Readers of printed texts rarely find themselves all in the same place at once, so print audiences often acquire an abstracted, [...]