Six months after Algeria won its independence, an unusual group of militants gathered in Algiers. Led by a Siamese-born French lawyer, Jacques Vergès, the group consisted of French and Algerian journalists, cartoonists, photographers, and militants. Their mission? To craft a new cultural and political journal. On February 2, 1963, the first issue of Révolution Africaine (RA) was released. Over the course of the next five years, RA experienced important upheavals: editors-in-chief were hired, fired, and arrested; journalists were trained and fled political persecution; the journal was even temporarily halted in 1965 after a coup d’état.

Despite this tumultuous history, RA became one of Algeria’s foremost French-language publications in the first decade of independence. Articles covered domestic politics and culture, journalists conducted in-depth investigations on international revolutionary movements and even reprinted letters and articles from sympathetic readers abroad. The publication had an important impact on debates about culture, politics, and society in the new nation, crafting a robust public square beyond the state. This article is the first institutional study of RA, examining how it articulated a counter-hegemonic definition of postcolonial Algerian identity alongside and beyond the state after 1962.

After Algeria became independent in 1962, the Front de Libération Nationale began a series of social, political, and economic reforms. These state policies dominate studies of  post-colonial identity, yet in the first decade of independence, civil society groups contributed to debates about Algeria’s revolutionary identity in the global South. Under Ahmed Ben Bella (1962-1965) and Houari Boumedienne (1965-1978), Islam, Arabism, and socialism became central components of national identity, defining Algeria as either part of continental Africa or the Arab world. Usually portrayed as an all-encompassing discourse, everyday Algerians in fact consumed, transformed, and challenged these narratives of belonging through civil institutions like literature or education.

Though often censored, the press played an important role in these debates about Algerian identity. RA provides a lens into the negotiation of French, African, and Arab identity in post-colonial Algeria. The publication’s journalists rejected the colonial past through a new revolutionary identity, they also strategically resisted the government’s attempt to dominate debates over the country’s future. In articulating an alternative definition of Algerian identity, RA crafted a public square of discourse that both emphasized the importance of postcolonial reform and challenged the FLN’s hegemonic claim to Algeria’s future… read more

The literary magazine, however fragile and limited as infrastructure, offered Caribbean writers a way to publish at home and to be circulated both at home and abroad. They made the careers of writers such as George Lamming, Derek Walcott, and Suzanne and Aimé Césaire, Alejo Carpentier, Nicolás Guillén, and many others. They made these careers by alternating between aesthetically launching the Caribbean into literary and geopolitical visibility and facilitating circulation to larger scale infrastructures in literary centers in Paris, London, Madrid, New York, and Mexico City.

Although my research is broader, I draw specifically on the following literary periodicals:

1. Tropiques (Fort de France, Martinique, 1941-1945)

Language: French (and some Kreyol)

Type: quarterly, no advertisements, subject to Vichy censorship for half-run, mostly literary publication including French literary works alongside local work and scattered work in translation from Spanish, includes literary and social theory fomenting black consciousness and increasingly evincing a Marxist political perspective, especially in second half  of run

Circulation: French Antilles, Haiti, Cuba, Curaçao, Mexico, New York, Alexandria, Chile, Venezuela

Editorial Collective: Aimé Césaire, Suzanne Césaire, René Ménil

2. BIM (Bridgetown, Barbados, 1942-1972)

Language: English (and various local dialects)

Type: semi-annual exclusively literary and programmatically apolitical periodical, financed by advertisements, demonstrating colonial self-censorship, dedicated to local literary production and becoming increasingly regional in scope in the late 1940s

Circulation: British West Indies and England

Editorial Collective: Frank Collymore & W. Therold Barnes with scouting work by George Lamming

3. Gaceta del Caribe (Habana, Cuba 1944)

Language: Spanish

Type: monthly, popular front literary critical and political periodical secretly financed by Cuban CP

Circulation: Haiti, Curaçao, Mexico, U.S., Venezuela, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay

Editorial Collective: Nicolás Guillén, Mirta Aguirre, Jose Antonio Portuondo, Angel Augier

Tunisia’s post-French colonial era was dominated by the political and social imagination of the one, President Habib Bourguiba, and his vision for a bourgeois colonial modernity. The most resilient voice of opposition (political and cultural) came from university campuses, and a nebulous leftist organization, Perspectives Tunisiennes or Amel ettounsi in colloquial Arabic, which the regime blamed for “corrupting the minds of youth with foreign ideas”. Their eponymous publication was widely read on campus, and survived government repression in 1968 and 1973. The journal shifted from a Paris-inspired Maoist tone in French in the 1960s, to a pro-Palestine guerilla and pro-workers leaning in Arabic in the 1970s, as the Paris-trained founding generations passed the torch to a homegrown, more provincial generation. As it is currently remembered and celebrated, this journal allowed young Tunisians to broaden their horizon from the restricted nationalist frame of analysis and envisage the terms of a Tunisian revolution.​

This paper considers how this publication shaped the Tunisian post-independence generation of leftists and their horizon of thought through the medium of language and ‘translation’. We will consider it as a multidimensional process: first, the linguistic operation that exposed Tunisian student audiences to leftist debates taking place in Paris and Beirut; second, by theorizing the Tunisian reality in terms of class struggle against the national bourgeoisie; third, we will ask about the impact of multilingual publishing from French, to classical Arabic to darija (spoken Tunisian), and how it was accompanied by a conceptual evolution of the journal’s message. Underneath these changes stood a constant effort to free Tunisia from a the colonial horizon of progress and come up with an alternative and appropriated language. As such, this abstract speaks to the material history of this periodical (area 1) and its modes of cultural resistance (area 3).

This case offers an opportunity to witness the conceptual and semantic evolution across languages in an underexplored country. This paper will first evoke the thematic components of the shift from French to Arabic, namely the topics of economic and social critique levelled against the regime on agrarian reform and the role of the petty nationalist bourgeoisie, to a focus on direct action, the Palestinian guerilla and the cost of everyday life. It will then revisit these issues with examples that highlight the overall “untheorization” of the journal’s prose. Finally, it carries out a diachronic conceptual analysis of “revolution” throughout the journal’s two phases, as we assess how it expanded Tunisian imagination of independence.

2. “(Non-)Aligned in Print: Anti-Colonial Aesthetics in Souffles-Anfas (1966-1971)”
Proposed for Counter-Cultural: Literary & Cultural Resistance in Periodicals

This paper is part of a larger book project that critically explores Arabic, Francophone, and bilingual cultural journals in the Maghreb (Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia) from roughly the 1930s-1970s. The study addresses the diversity of Maghrebi periodicals across aesthetic, formal, and ideological registers to better understand the capaciousness of the cultural journal as a hybrid genre.

For the Revolutionary Papers collective, I am focusing on the anticolonial Marxist-Leninist journal Souffles-Anfas which was published in French and Arabic from 1966-1971. The periodical’s inaugural editorials frame their mission as “cultural decolonization” mobilizing “terrorist” and “guerilla” literary techniques. Addressing the increasingly Marxist-Leninist orientation of the journal’s editorial collective—referred to as either comité d’action or group d’action—my paper maps Souffles-Anfas’ aesthetic evolution by exploring the journal’s auto-theorization across editorials, manifestos, op-eds, and dossiers. Specifically, it focuses on the periodical’s reflections on decolonization, language politics, as well as supranational political and cultural alliances across the global south (pan-Arab, pan-African, tricontinental, non-aligned).

Scholars commonly periodize Souffles’ transformation from an avant-garde francophone journal with tricontinental affinities specializing in poetics to Anfas as a militant mouthpiece of the Moroccan left focused on regional decolonization—and particularly the question of Palestine (Olivia Harrison 2013 & 2016; Andy Stafford 2009; Teresa Villa-Ignacio 2017). Accounting for pivotal historical crises and movements that shaped this period—from Vietnam to Cuba to Algeria; from the June 1967 war to May 1968—this paper considers the anti-colonial and Marxist-Leninist leanings of the journal across both its francophone and Arabophone writings.

Souffles-Anfas’ subtle tension between the ‘literary’ and the ‘cultural’ is reflected in its rebranding from reveu poétique et littéraire [poetic and literary magazine], to revue maghrébine littéraire culturelle trimestrielle [quarterly Maghrebi literary cultural magazine], to revue culturelle arabe du Maghreb [Arab cultural magazine from the Maghreb]. While its final issues excise the ‘literary’ from its generic subheading, the journal nonetheless continues to publish literary works alongside manifestoes, treatise, op-eds, and dossiers. Interrogating the ways in which Souffles-Anfas’ political aims are formally and aesthetically staged across languages and genres, I attend to the dialectical, dialogic, and polyvocal qualities of the cultural journal.

La Ruche, ‘Organe de la jeune génération,’ Journal Hebdomadaire Littéraire et Social, began in late 1945 as a cultural, literary and political revue produced by left-militant youth would go on to become some of Haiti’s most important intellectual and political actors. Members of La Ruche, such as poet, René Depestre, future novelist, Jacques Stephen Alexis, and photographer, Gérald Bloncourt, published forty-two French-language issues between December 7th 1945 and December 9th 1946. Amidst the length of the journal’s run, Haiti would experience a popular uprising led by members of the La Ruche editorial board in January 1946 (also known as Les Cinq Glorieuses), coinciding with the incendiary lecture series of the surrealist poet, André Breton, in Port-au-Prince. The pages of La Ruche bear witness to the political conjuncture of a Black Jacobinist anti-imperialism and a Popular Front antifascism imported into the literary scene by intellectuals with connections to Spanish republicanism and the French Resistance. The amalgam of these two different traditions appears perfectly blended in the political imaginaries of the ’46 generation. My paper will consider the events of the 1946 revolution in relation to La Ruche, and the mobilization of a Haitian surrealist antifascism legible in its pages. Their signature imbrication of Atlantic World anti-colonialism and Third World anti-fascism, with its robust vision of liberation through both poetic and practical means, is an important precedent for analyzing opposition against ascendant far-right authoritarian regimes in the Global South.

During the 1920s the primary medium for activities of the cultural, artistic and political left were journals and periodicals. They served as platforms for the vanguard(-isms) in general, directing attention to other groups, initiatives, and publications. They were a gathering point; a place for sharing artistic programs and discussions, political propaganda, public debates and confrontations with readers, as well as sites for collective efforts. In The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines (2013) Peter Brooker underlined the avant-garde practice as “networked exchange” across borders thanks to the role of periodicals, which shaped the global modernism.​

In my paper prepared for the workshop I intend to apply recent studies on 1920s avant-garde journals and periodicals to develop a discourse on transcontinental networks of the political, cultural and artistic Magazines that operated in the early 1970s in Latin America, Africa and Europe. I intend to discuss Casa de Las Americas from the years of 1970-1972. It was a period, when editors of this Cuban periodical devoted one of the numbers to Pan-African Festival in Algiers (1970, No. 58) and begun to advertise Souffles and AfricAsia directing attention to revolutionary circles in Rabat and Paris. I intend to discuss their contacts and situate them on the global and historical spectrum of revolutionary, left-wing, artistic, literary and avant-garde publications. I aim to explore the “networked exchange” of these three Magazines, which entered into transnational circulation and aimed to create a platform of transcontinental propaganda of solidarity for revolutionary movements in Africa, Asia and Latin America.