Literature Beyond the Book: Small Magazines in Africa and The Diaspora

This course seeks to examine the small magazine as a form that left its own literary signature in the long twentieth century, within Africa and its diasporas. It is a form that not only connected Africans and their diasporic kin, but also fostered literary cultures, debates and created conditions for the rise of African and Black Diasporic literary canons. The course will sweep across the long twentieth century after the 'color line': the interwar through the NAACP's The Crisis and UNIA's Negro World; decolonization in Africa with Transition, Black Orpheus, Lotus and Drum and the new Millennium of 'digilittle' magazines like Kwani? Jalada and the new iteration of Transition at Harvard and Chimurenga.