Arising out of a conference convened at the University of Cape Town in 2008, this edited book is one of a small number of texts that brings Africa's historians together with colleagues working in the Americas. It is a happy collaboration, for the authors approach their subject – the history of writing – in different ways and the tensions between them are productive. Africa's historians have been preoccupied with drawing distinctions between the old order of orality and the colonial order of bureaucratic rationality. In Latin America, by contrast, there is a large scholarship on what Walter Mignolo calls ‘alternative literacies’, the concurrent forms of writing that Nahua and other Meso-American peoples developed during the period of Spanish governance. Following Mignolo's lead, the Latin America chapters in this collection explore a wide set of inscriptional practices: there are chapters on Nahua pictography, on blood as a medium for calligraphy, and on the itineraries of Afro-Cuban painting. The Africa papers are less ecumenical; but, like the Latin America scholars, the Africanists focus on the material circumstances that shaped authors' compositions. Taken as a whole, this book brings the infrastructure of textual production into focus.

The book opens with two essays that illuminate the relationship between alphabetic writing and other forms of inscription. Archaeologist Jean-Loïc Le Quellec investigates the link between ancient Saharan rock art and the more recently developed alphabets of Libya's Berber people. Rock art was not a predecessor to the alphabet, he argues; it had its own ways of signifying. So did the pictographic script of Nahua people in pre-conquest Mexico. As Patrick Johansson shows, pictographs formed an impression on the mind of the onlooker, but they did not determine the readers' apprehension of the meaning of the text. It was Spanish Franciscans and their Nahua converts who transformed this writing system into a vehicle for communication. In New Spain and elsewhere, the alphabet reorganized the architecture of communication among colonized people.

The essays in the second section are about the material circulation of written texts. They help us see books as objects that are current in some places (but not others), which are authored in the mundane space of routine. Hervé Pennec studies the itineraries of three manuscripts – all composed by Jesuits in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – concerning the kingdom of Ethiopia. Pennec shows how missionaries learned from, dialogued with, and corrected their contemporaries. Adrien Delmas's fascinating chapter shows how the practice of dead-reckoning in navigation – which obliged the sailor to keep a regular written account of wind and current – helped to fuel writing of history in the Dutch East India Company. In Cape Town and other settlements, sailors' logbooks were expanded into encompassing chronicles of events. The first historical account of the company's work, composed in 1701, was a précis of the massive archives, meant to extract valuable information from the ever-proliferating paperwork (pp. 121–2).

There follow several chapters that concern the ways literary conventions structured writers' assessments of the world in which they lived. David J. Culpin shows how the French writer Charlevoix, travelling through North America in the mid-eighteenth century, organized his ostensibly factual account around the conventions of contemporary moralistic writing. Peter Merrington's chapter on historical argumentation in late nineteenth-century Cape Town is one of two essays – the other is from historian Gerald Groenwald – that trace the genealogy of literary culture at the Cape. Both Merrington and Groenwald go into the libraries of leading public figures, showing how their reading habits helped to structure their public lives.

The final chapters in the book detail the unexpected ways in which colonized people engaged with the textual technologies of government. The star of the volume is José Antonio Aponte, cabinet-maker and sculptor in early nineteenth-century Cuba, who composed 72 large paintings concerning the religious history of the black world. Anthropologist Jorge Pavez Ojeda investigates the multiple sources of his inspiration. Aponte's library was inhabited by black clerics, heroes, and kings. His paintings were meant to instruct those who gathered at his home about the characters of whom he had read. Aponte's career shows how a life in books could help colonized people place themselves in landscapes that were far distant from their locality.

This volume shows what Africanists can learn from our colleagues working in Latin America. Instead of regarding the advent of writing as a departure from an older, fluid, oral world, we can – prompted by our colleagues' example – treat alphabetic literacy as one of a range of techniques by which Africans learned to condense the changeable flow of discourse. This is where the history of written culture overlaps with the history of material life.