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

Project description

Recovering Sub-Saharan Africa’s forgotten print history

Sub-Saharan Africa’s rich print history is often overlooked, especially when viewed through a global lens. Magazines from the region, spanning from 1918 to 1968, are slowly disappearing, and with them, a crucial record of cultural and political change. These publications played key roles in supporting decolonisation and creating new literary and artistic traditions. Yet, their global connections and influence remain understudied. With this in mind, the ERC-funded AFROPRESS project seeks to recover this lost history. By studying magazines from five countries, it will explore how they connected Sub-Saharan Africa with Black internationalist and anti-colonial networks. Through interviews and archival research, AFROPRESS will reveal the global impact of these forgotten periodicals.

Objective

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 subcontinents cultural and political magazines from the period 1918-68a 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.

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(opens in new window) ERC-2024-STG

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Host institution

VRIJE UNIVERSITEIT BRUSSEL
Net EU contribution

Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.

€ 1 497 659,00
Address
PLEINLAAN 2
1050 BRUSSEL
Belgium

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Region
Région de Bruxelles-Capitale/Brussels Hoofdstedelijk Gewest Région de Bruxelles-Capitale/ Brussels Hoofdstedelijk Gewest Arr. de Bruxelles-Capitale/Arr. Brussel-Hoofdstad
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
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Total cost

The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.

€ 1 497 659,00

Beneficiaries (1)

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