African literary journals in French and Portuguese, 1947-1968: politics, culture and form
<p>This is a study of two literary journals published in Europe in the years around African decolonization: <em>Présence Africaine</em> in Paris, and <em>Mensagem</em> in Lisbon. Drawing on close reading, archival research and work in postcolonial and critical theory, t...
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| Format: | Thesis |
| Sprog: | French English Portuguese |
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2018
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| Summary: | <p>This is a study of two literary journals published in Europe in the years around African decolonization: <em>Présence Africaine</em> in Paris, and <em>Mensagem</em> in Lisbon. Drawing on close reading, archival research and work in postcolonial and critical theory, the thesis offers the first substantial engagement with the connections between the two journals.</p>
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<p>The study considers how the body of thinking these journals represent can inform contemporary literary-critical postcolonial scholarship and makes a number of theoretical propositions. First, the study argues for the significance of the literary journal as a key form in the conjuncture of African decolonization. Second, it proposes (and demonstrates) a historically and geographically contingent understanding of the relationships between literature, culture and politics. Third, through its interrogation of multi-scalar anti-colonial literary geographies, the study makes an empirical and theoretical contribution to comparative, multilingual and ‘transcolonial’ scholarship in francophone and lusophone postcolonial studies. Finally, I make a further empirical contribution to the study of African and anti-colonial literary history by bringing forward the place of women at both institutions and analysing their writing.</p>
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<p>Very little academic work has treated French and Portuguese language anti-colonial literary practice comparatively. If anything, postcolonial work in both languages has been more concerned to delineate the historical and theoretical distinctiveness of francophone and lusophone literary histories from a dominant body of anglophone postcolonial theory. As this research emphasizes, however, much anti-colonial African publishing and writing in French, Portuguese and English deliberately deployed translation and multilingual modes of ‘lateral and associative’ (Boehmer, 2005) intertextuality as a way of countering state-backed exceptionalist arguments about the French and Portuguese languages and colonial projects. This intertextuality is manifest in literary journals.</p>
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<p>Methodologically, this study both compares the two journals and also figures them as part of shared transnational literary and anti-colonial networks. I propose modes of comparative reading capable of dealing both with the specificity of Portuguese and French colonial and anti-colonial histories <em>and</em> with the continuities between European colonial-capitalist practices. This comparative mode addresses both the particularities of African writing in French and Portuguese and the multilingual intertextuality these journals display.</p> |
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