Anticolonial Networks and Unbalances in Literary Journals and Bulletins: Mensagem, Présence Africaine and Black Orpheus

Abstract

This paper looks at the connections between the editorial projects of Mensagem (edited in Lisbon, by Casa dos Estudantes do Império, 1948–1965), Présence Africaine (Paris, France and Dakar, Senegal, from 1947) and Black Orpheus (Ibadan, Nigeria, 1957–1975). It reflects on the mobility of objects and ideas through the networks established within Africa and Europe by the negritudinists, pan-African, or anticolonial writers and intellectuals discussed in those journals and magazines. The circulations of texts, authors, and translations among those three literary projects were connected to a conception of art committed to the dignification of cultures and knowledges beyond Eurocentric conceptions. This text maps connections, circulations, and translations of printed material crosscutting colonial languages. Finally, this paper problematizes the dynamics and imbalances that characterized those publications, related to intellectual displacement and the consequences of colonial rule on the conceptual and socio-political systems.