Across 104 issues, Mediodía published a dazzling constellation of authors, including Cubans such as the anthropologist Fernando Ortiz, the lawyer and feminist activist Ofelia Domínguez Navarro, the novelist Alejo Carpentier, and the Afro-Cuban poet Regino Pedroso. They also included Latin American, US, and European writers of radical sympathies, from Langston Hughes to César Vallejo, and from André Malraux to Isaak Babel. It was initially a literary monthly before becoming a weekly magazine with a strong political and current affairs focus. Within months it had a circulation of 10,000 copies, its readership spread across the island. Mediodía was centrally concerned with Cuban domestic politics, and with the struggles for democratic representation and for racial and gender equality. But amid the ferment of the 1930s, these battles could not be disconnected from the broader turbulence afflicting the world. The magazine’s coverage reflected this sense of global interconnection: reportage on the Spanish Civil War nestled alongside essays on racial discrimination in Cuba; accounts of Chinese resistance to Japanese occupation featured next to warnings of the looming threat Nazi Germany posed to Czechoslovakia.

Mediodía provides a compelling window onto Cuban politics in the 1930s, where a populist revolution had been thwarted in 1933–34, yet the democratizing impulses the revolution had unleashed had not yet been contained. Urgent questions about imperialism, Cuba’s national sovereignty, racial inequality, and social injustice were in the air, prompting fervent and wide-ranging debates, and these were all reflected in Mediodía’s pages. At the same time, for the magazine’s editors, the boundary between internal questions and global issues was entirely permeable: the anti-imperialist, anti-fascist, and anti racist struggles were bound together into a single battle with many interconnected fronts.

Christopher Ouma and Madhu Krishnan

The small magazine has held a significant but understudied effect on not only the project of imagining Africa in the long twentieth century, but also of articulating projects of solidarity, intimacy and political action. As a key node within larger ecologies of print culture, the small magazine is notable for the ways in which its flexible form and sometimes eccentric modes of circulation trouble what have come to be seen as ‘orthodox’ or received wisdom as to the nature of self-fashioning and modernity on the African continent. While the ‘smallness’ of its form underlines its context as a site-specific platform of cultural production, it’s networks of circulation and the audiences and publics it convenes point to a wider and much more ambitious intention which cannot be reduced to simplistic or one-dimensional systemic models of understanding. As ‘form’ and therefore a ‘genre’ in the long twentieth century of African cultural production, the small magazine has convened various platforms for the articulation and intersection of various projects, often in intersectional logic; anti-colonialism, pan-Africanism, Anti-apartheid imagination and broader project(s) of decolonization during the second half of the twentieth century. This project seeks to examine how small magazines are able, through the networks they create scale up and scale down their visibility through various strategies of curation and self-fashioning which evolve and transform over time and space. It is the specific nexus of scalability, in tandem with the curatorial potentiality of the small magazine through various models of formal juxtaposition and intellectual patterning, we argue, which has lent it its importance as an archive of the present with respect to African models of intellectual production. Such strategies account for the longevity, political and cultural potency of the form which has had a significant footprint in the long twentieth century of political and cultural organization and the imagination of identity in the continent. The project draws from example in magazines such Transition, Black Orpheus, Nexus/Busara, Chimurenga Chronic, Kwani? amongst many others, exploring how media, platform, visibility, publicness, form and genre come together in the small magazine to produce new understandings of African models of modernity, coalition and solidarity.

This study examines how the Early South African Black Press can be used to apply notions of decoloniality and multilinguals to the teaching of journalism and society in the South African context.  The study will be exploratory, and will use the three metaphors of coloniality, namely power, knowledge and being, to expose the ways in which journalism, a discipline which was once a disruptor, now needs to be disrupted due to the ways in which it has been co-opted into a neoliberal agenda that sees news as a commodity to be sold, rather than a public good.  The content, context and authors of material from the Early Indigenous South African Black Press, turn the notions explored in the journalism and society module on their heads and expose ways in which the discipline espouses coloniality, and they also provide an example of what is possible if one takes a decolonial approach. It also provides a model of how local media can employ multilingualism in ways that are successful.   The chapter will show how, by drawing on texts from the resistant black press, which was instrumental in keeping African people’s voice alive during the many decades of oppression, journalism can be taught differently in order to re-center the voices of the marginalised, and speak to people in their own languages. The key texts to be considered are from the newspaper Abantu-Batho (The People) which was published in English, isiXhosa, isiZulu, seTswana and seSotho between 1912 and 1931.  It was Founded in Johannesburg with a grant from the queen regent Nabotsibeni of Swaziland on the advice of Pixley ka Izaka Seme, a solicitor to the Swazi monarchy at the time.

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.

The Malayalam journal Prabhatham was launched in 1935 with the emergence of a Congress Socialist cell within the nationalist party in Kerala. From its inception it was subjected to censorship and surveillance by the colonial government as the newspaper began to create a universe of reporting that introduced a socialist vocabulary into Malayalam, evolved new words for talking about society and equality, and envisaged a new geography of revolution in the world. It was a short-lived newspaper curtailed both by the formation of the communist party as much as colonial repression.

This paper reconstructs the connections between Du Bois and Cuban intellectuals within global south struggles for anti-racist democracies. The first section shows how Du Bois connections with Cuba occurred both at the level of intellectual collectives and through interpersonal relationships. Besides the prominent anthropologist Fernando Ortiz, Du Bois maintained contact with Gustavo Urrutia, who was an intellectual and journalist, author of an opinion column in the influential Cuban newspaper “Diario de la Marina.” Urrutia’s column Ideals of a Race focused on racism and colonialism in Cuba from 1928 to 1931.​

Urrutia and Du Bois connection was initially given through the publication of some writings by Urrutia in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) magazine, The Crisis, in 1931 and 1932. Urrutia’s ideas were anchored in a community around the Cuban periodical “Adelante” which functioned as an expression of the anti-racist struggle and denunciation of the wounds in Cuban democracy after Machado anti-popular government (1925-1933). “Adelante” not only debated the problem of blacks in the Cuban nation but also demanded economic reparation as a response to the legacies of slavery.

My argument regards the work of black intellectuals that, during the 1930s, addressed issues that were close to a Dubosian perspective (Itzigshon and Brown 2019). I analyze how these organic intellectuals worked in a Marxist-Dubosian way of analysis regarding racism, culture, and nationalism in Cuba.

In March of 1936, “Adelante” wrote a piece on W.E.B. Du Bois, in which he appears as an analyst of the historical injustices to blacks in the United States, highlighting the publications of the University of Atlanta. Although “Adelante” stands out bibliographical work of Du Bois, his work on “structural racism” was raised. This gives an account of intellectuals and activists’ nationalist and anti-imperialist perspective. In this vein, I refer not only to Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction (1935) but also to Gustavo Urrutia’s writings in “Adelante” under the title El nuevo Negro (1937) and Alberto Arredondo’s El Negro en Cuba (1939) as part of the same political-intellectual anti-racist struggle.

Focusing on Cuba is not neutral since this country played a crucial role in the intellectual production in Latin America not only because of the multiple connections with socialism in Europe and the United States but also because of an anti-racist political movement linked to the reconstruction of republicanism in the Caribbean.

​In this paper, I make a claim for Ethiopia as hidden or overlooked revolutionary trope in South African politics and letters and trace its inscription across selected examples of popular South African newspapers. In South Africa, the idea of Ethiopia has been an important site of pan-Africanist and anti-colonial re-imagining, affirmation and investment going back to the mid-nineteenth century. This can be traced not only its political significance as the last remaining independent African state but also to a history of dissident reading practices in which canonical Ethiopian references were appropriated by writers and activists as part of an anti-colonial politics. With the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, the idea of Ethiopia assumed new prominence and the event was widely reported across a range of newspapers. Focusing on editorials, news items, letters to the editor, cartoons and photographs in two Communist-aligned newspapers, Umsebenzi and Umvikele Thebe, this paper makes a case for the importance of these newspapers as non-canonical sites of political engagement and exegesis. While asserting a more general argument about the significance of print culture as a polyphonous mode of popular political and cultural intervention, it also looks at the ways in which the idea of Ethiopia was marshalled in print as a focal point of political disruption, radical engagement and black diasporic connection; in short, as part of a more general inquiry into forums of the counter-political, the paper explores the importance of Ethiopia in relation to developing anti-colonial perspectives and vocabularies of dissent in South Africa.