Literary journals proliferated across colonial Europe, the Caribbean, and Africa in the decades around decolonization. In this lecture, I focus on two of the most influential publications with the widest international reach: Présence Africaine (published in Paris from 1947) and Mensagem (published in Lisbon from 1946-64) to discuss questions of method, gender, and form.

Neither journal published much work ascribed to women in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. Like many nationalist organizations, these literary institutions were patriarchal spaces, underpinned by norms of sociality that marginalized women, and particularly black women. Two questions emerge here. First, what divisions of labour underpinned the journals and shaped their form? I argue that even when not acknowledged as authors, women were involved in the connective and comparative work both journals undertook, notably as translators. Though invisibilized, translation enabled the internationalist projects of both journals: as Brent Hayes Edwards has suggested elsewhere, ‘translation is one of the ways the “turbine” of the cultures of black internationalism is lubricated.’ Second, what did the few women who were published say? Across those pieces, a multiscalar anticolonial sensibility emerged that wrote gendered experience and domestic space into anticolonial politics, and figured hermetic gender categories as themselves a form of colonial enclosure. The multiscarity of these minor voices moved beyond the journals’ dominant discussions about political independence and black and human emancipation, which were typically undertaken in gender-neutral terms.  Parsing these journals requires modes of reading alive to these cracks and fragments, to understand the literary journal as a form of thought comprised of—rather than compromised by—its dissonances, polyphony and contestations.

SPEAKER
Alexandra Reza, University of Bristol

Organizer
Karel Pletinck, KWI International Fellow

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Organizers
Organized by the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities (KWI).