Anticolonial Form: Literary Journals at the End of Empire (Oxford Modern Languages and Literature Monographs)

Anticolonial Form: Literary Journals at the End of Empire addresses the relationship between culture and politics in two journals published in Europe by African writers: Présence Africaine , launched in Paris in 1947, and Mensagem , published between 1948 and 1964 in Lisbon. Grounded in extensive archival work, the book argues for a comparative and transnational approach to postcolonial literary studies, for the significance of the literary journal as a key form in the development of African writing in French, Portuguese, and English, and for a historically and geographically contingent understanding of the relationships between literature, culture, and politics. This book takes up the idea of articulation (drawn from the cultural theorist Stuart Hall) to bring forward the contingent and fugitive connections that networks of literary journals fostered between francophone, anglophone, and lusophone writers in the conjuncture of decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s. It argues that comparison as a praxis and a method was central to the anticolonial charge of those journals, on whose pages we see an iterative back and forth between writing from and about different parts of the colonial world, a recursive effort to establish how ideas and analyses developed in one part of the colonial world could travel, and be adopted and adapted in others. Reza figures this back and forth between sameness and difference as a comparative practice and argues that different journals formalized this comparative thrust through the techniques of juxtaposition and translation. This anticolonial comparative sensibility, enabled by the journal form, produced a powerful analytic for understanding different European colonialisms together, not in mononational, monoimperialist terms as disaggregated and radically separate, but as connected in material and ideological terms. Many scholars have argued convincingly that the institutionalised practice of comparison in the academic field of comparative literature is itself imbricated with histories of colonialism. Reza's argument, which is richly historicized and substantiated with extensive archival work, takes on a particular significance in the context of that critique as the anticolonial comparison she focuses on offers a different tradition of relational praxis from which to think about connection and comparison itself. Anticolonial Form: Literary Journals at the End of Empire addresses the relationship between culture and politics in two journals published in Europe by African writers: Présence Africaine, launched in Paris in 1947, and Mensagem, published between 1948 and 1964 in Lisbon. Grounded in extensive archival work, the book argues for a comparative and transnational approach to postcolonial literary studies, for the significance of the literary journal as a key form in the development of African writing in French, Portuguese, and English, and for a historically and geographically contingent understanding of the relationships between literature, culture, and politics. This book takes up the idea of articulation to bring forward the contingent and fugitive connections that networks of literary journals fostered between francophone, anglophone, and lusophone writers in the conjuncture of decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s. It argues that comparison as a praxis and a method was central to the anticolonial charge of those journals, on whose pages we see an iterative back and forth between writing from and about different parts of the colonial world, a recursive effort to establish how ideas and analyses developed in one part of the colonial world could travel, and be adopted and adapted in others Many scholars have argued convincingly that the institutionalized practice of comparison in the academic field of comparative literature is itself imbricated with histories of colonialism. Reza's argument takes on a particular significance in the context of that critique as the anticolonial comparison on which she focuses offers a different tradition of relational praxis from which to think about connection and comparison itself. Cover Title page Copyright page Preface Acknowledgements Contents Note on translations, archives, and referencing Introduction: Journals, decolonization, and a little formalism Part I A dialectic of literature and politics 1 An articulated journal form 2 Theorising reading, writing and society 3 Multilingual modernism 4 Questions of method Part II Cracks and fragments 5 A polyphonic history of articulated negritude 6 Women, work, and multiscalar anticolonialism 7 Redrawing the colonial map Epilogue: Co-colonialism and the stakes of comparison Appendix 1: Figures Appendix 2: Timeline Bibliography Index