12 NOVEMBER , 2017
CFP: Small Magazines,
Literary Networks and
Self-Fashioning
in Africa and its Diasporas
(deadline for abstracts 30 Nov)
Small Magazines, Literary Networks and
Self-Fashioning in Africa and its Diasporas
19-20 January 2018
University of Bristol, UK
This two-day conference seeks to explore the role of small
magazines, literary journals and periodicals and other
alternative print cultures from Africa in the larger context
of Black Internationalism and its legacies. Through their
role as sites of intimacy and collaboration, these publications
give rise to the creation of networks of affiliation and
corridors of storytelling which span localities, regions,
transnational and diasporic contexts, functioning as active
participants in the creation of black and African ideologies
in the global imaginary. These networks, in turn, play a
crucial role in everyday social, cultural and political life on
the continent. From the late days of empire to the present
day, cultural forms of expression have served as central
media through which claims towards and against modernity
and self-actualisation have developed, while also offering
an outlet for the fostering of large-scale forms of activism
and for the transmission of new orthodoxies for subjectivity,
both individual and collective. In this conference, we
examine these issues, considering the circulation and
production of small magazines in Africa in order to explore
the ways in which they enable lateral forms of self-fashioning.
Ranging from formal publications in receipt of state and
NGO sponsorship to informal ‘zines’ circulated through
counter-cultural networks, and taking forms spanning
print and digital media, small magazines are often neither
widely known nor accessible outside of their specific
localities; yet, through their vernacular and often-overlapping
trajectories of distribution, these publications hold a
significant role in the fostering of everyday practices,
cultural memory while continuing to ask larger questions
about the legacies of empire in a neo-liberal global capitalist
order, driven through the platform of the nation-state.
the following:
– What forms of identification are produced, contested and
authenticated in the small magazines which proliferate across
the continent?
– What do the aesthetics of small magazines suggest about the
contours of the literary more broadly?
are produced across the long durée of small magazines on
the continent?
and readers function with respect to formalised political and
civic networks?
entanglements of actors and publics?
concepts such as modernity, print culture, black intellectual
histories, Black internationalism?
an archive of the present?
to smallmagazines@gmail.com by 30 November 2017.
The organisers will convey their decisions by 8 December 2017.
come out of conversations between a new interdisciplinary network
of researchers and literary producers examining the circulation
and production of small magazines in Sub-Sahran Africa. This
AHRC Research Network, ‘Small Magazines, Literary Networks
and Self-Fashioning in Africa and its Diasporas’ is convened by
Dr Madhu Krishnan (University of Bristol) and Dr Chris Ouma
(University of Cape Town) and this year has hosted workshops in
Cape Town (April 2017) and Kampala (August 2017) to explore
the relationship between small magazines and the construction
of affiliation, identity and civic participation. New research coming
out of this network will be showcased at this conference, hosted at
University of Bristol, in January 2018.
For previous AiW posts in the series, see AiW Guests, Sarah Smit’s
‘Finding Affiliations: Reading Communities, Literary Institutions &
Small Magazines‘ and ”A secret history of the nation’:
Small Magazines at Writivism 2017‘ by Nathan Suhr-Systma.