Anticolonial Form: Literary Journals at the End of Empire

Anticolonial Form: Literary Journals at the End of Empire addresses the relationship between culture and politics in two journals published in Europe by African writers: Présence Africaine, launched in Paris in 1947, and Mensagem, published between 1948 and 1964 in Lisbon. Grounded in extensive archival work, the book argues for a comparative and transnational approach to postcolonial literary studies, for the significance of the literary journal as a key form in the development of African writing in French, Portuguese, and English, and for a historically and geographically contingent understanding of the relationships between literature, culture, and politics.

This book takes up the idea of articulation (drawn from the cultural theorist Stuart Hall) to bring forward the contingent and fugitive connections that networks of literary journals fostered between francophone, anglophone, and lusophone writers in the conjuncture of decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s. It argues that comparison as a praxis and a method was central to the anticolonial charge of those journals, on whose pages we see an iterative back and forth between writing from and about different parts of the colonial world, a recursive effort to establish how ideas and analyses developed in one part of the colonial world could travel, and be adopted and adapted in others.

Reza figures this back and forth between sameness and difference as a comparative practice and argues that different journals formalized this comparative thrust through the techniques of juxtaposition and translation. This anticolonial comparative sensibility, enabled by the journal form, produced a powerful analytic for understanding different European colonialisms together, not in mononational, monoimperialist terms as disaggregated and radically separate, but as connected in material and ideological terms.

Many scholars have argued convincingly that the institutionalised practice of comparison in the academic field of comparative literature is itself imbricated with histories of colonialism. Reza’s argument, which is richly historicized and substantiated with extensive archival work, takes on a particular significance in the context of that critique as the anticolonial comparison she focuses on offers a different tradition of relational praxis from which to think about connection and comparison itself.

Alexandra Reza, Lecturer in Comparative Literatures and Cultures, University of Bristol

Alexandra Reza joined the University of Bristol in 2021 as a lecturer in Comparative Literatures and Cultures, and as the director of Bristol’s new BA in Comparative Literatures and Cultures. In 2024-2027 she will take up a British Academy/Wolfson Fellowship. Her work has appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as South Atlantic Quarterly, Interventions: A Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Research in African Literatures, Journal of Lusophone Studies and French Studies. She also regularly writes for a wider audience in publications such as the London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, New Left Review and Le Monde Diplomatique. In 2022 she was selected as a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker.