“Oral tradition”—not a concept I’m really comfortable with, actually. It’s partly its sneaky connotations: “oral” as symbol of the primitive, the other, the marginal at the edge of the triumphant western dream; “tradition”/ “traditional” too: opposed to modern/western/literate/individual/creative, implicitly highlighting transmission and the “old,” downplaying creativity, multiple agency, politics, inventiveness. Nowadays we query those onceobvious ethnocentric universalizing assumptions, of course, and instead explore the overlap and interpenetration of oral and written (their intermingling with other media too—music, dance, material displays, electronic options) and look not to essentialized divisions between “old” and “new” but to historical changes and multiplicities (to changing genres, to new media interacting with established themes, to contemporary forms not just “traditional” ones)—but the older connotations still keep sneaking through. “Oral tradition” isn’t very transparent as an analytical concept anyhow: “oral” with its ambiguity between “voiced” and (the potentially much wider) “non-written”; “tradition” as—what exactly? what’s ruled out? In the areas I’ve worked in (around issues to do with performance, oral/performed literature, narrative, popular culture—in Africa and comparatively) the term “oral tradition” hasn’t proved particularly illuminating as such and isn’t nowadays very widely used. It has pragmatic uses, though. As in this journal, it has served to gather together questions of textuality, orality, voice, text, performance, verbal art in a way too often ignored elsewhere. It fills—and challenges—gaps left in the canons of many established academic disciplines. And its cross-cultural framework and synoptic wide-ranging vision, unfettered by discipline-imposed shibboleths, can take us constructively across language, text, literary analysis, genre, media studies, popular culture, performance, information technology, and