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.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
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Keywords
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
MAIN PROGRAMME
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Topic(s)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Funding Scheme
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants
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Call for proposal
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Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2024-STG
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1050 BRUSSEL
Belgium
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