Recovering Global Exchanges from Sub-Saharan Africa's Cultural and Political Magazines in the Age of Black Internationalism, 1918-68

ongoing

Sub-Saharan Africa is often bypassed in global histories and its print cultures seldom approached through a transnational lens. To recover a lost history of global engagement, AFROPRESS will turn to the subcontinent’s cultural and political magazines from the period 1918-68—a vast, yet slowly disappearing archive. These magazines played key roles in effecting change, from fuelling decolonisation to creating literary and artistic canons. AFROPRESS advances the hypothesis that magazines shaped this transformation through their global orientation, that is, the way they reached out, across borders within and beyond Sub-Saharan Africa, to Black internationalist and anticolonial networks. It will examine these dynamics in five countries: Congo-Brazzaville, Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, South Africa and Madagascar. Recent efforts in digitising periodicals from these countries have created the perfect opportunity to explore these sources, often for the first time. To address gaps in the digital record, and to study the multifaceted nature of a range of periodicals, AFROPRESS will assemble a team with expertise in literary and periodical studies as well as art, book, social and political history. Its innovative strategy combines interviews with historical actors and research in diverse national and private archives across Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa. In so doing, AFROPRESS will break new ground on three levels. (1) Analytically, it will be a milestone in our understanding of the globally interactive nature and agency of cultural and political magazines from Sub-Saharan Africa. (2) Methodologically, it will open up periodical studies to further interdisciplinary inquiry and develop a model of exchange triangulating periodical studies, world literature and postcolonial and African studies. (3) Empirically, it will recover little-known sources that demand scholarly engagement, serving as a prompt for further digitisation efforts.