Coming of age in the 1960s in newly independent Senegal, documentarist Samba Félix Ndiaye participated in a ciné-club at the French Cultural Center in Dakar with a group of friends that included fellow future filmmakers Ben Diogaye Beye, Mahama Traoré, and Djibril Diop Mambety. Movie marathons were followed by passionate debates, Ndiaye recounted later, during which “the provocateurs who supported Intolerance were angry at the Battleship Potemkin fanatics, and the devotees of German...

In a blurb published on its website, the Cape Town-based literary activist collective Chimurenga describes the motivation behind issue fifteen of its eponymous journal, titled “The Curriculum is Everything”: Presented in the form of a textbook, Chimurenga 15 simultaneously mimics the structure while gutting it. All entries are regrouped under subjects such as body parts, language, grace, worship and news (from the other side), numbers, parents, police and many more. Through a classification...

This summer, as I was wrapping up my dissertation and packing my boxes in upstate New York, I started watching Satyajit Ray’s Jai Baba Felunath ( The Elephant God, 1979) after what felt like a lifetime. The film is based on a novel from Ray’s own children’s detective series featuring the celebrated Bengali private investigator Prodosh C. Mitter, aka Felu-da (“da” being an affectionate honorific for elder brother). In a 1980 review, Gene Moscowitz calls it “Ray’s bow to that Yank hardboiled...

Nadia Nurhussein’s 2019 book, Black Land: Imperial Ethiopianism and African America, analyzes the literature and texts being produced in response to broader Western interest in Ethiopia and its leadership during an 80-year stretch of Black history from the 1860s to the 1940s. Drawing on a wide range of materials such as poetry, novels, newspaper articles, and theatrical or cinematic performances, Nurhussein demonstrates not only how entrenched these conversations were in African Americans’ lives but also the ways that this interest created a paradox: How does one advocate for Black freedom when the focal point of the Ethiopians’ fight is a monarchy that is bent on expanding its territory, little different from the Europeans that threaten it?

1959: The Atlantic magazine devotes its April issue to “Africa South of the Sahara.” Articles on the politics of decolonization frame a large number of contributions on art and culture. A short story by Chinua Achebe appears alongside the work of Nadine Gordimer, Tom Mboya, Léon Damas, Léopold Sédar-Senghor, Amos Tutuola, and David Diop. “The Sacrificial Egg” is Achebe’s first story published in the United States, and its timing supports the US release of his novel Things Fall Apart. Unlike that classic novel, the story begins in a recognizably modern Nigeria, with a young clerk named Julius Obi sitting alone in a colonial shipping office, gazing at his typewriter. But The Atlantic upstages this narrative by suspending a dark ovoid shape with curling horns above the title and author information, its square eye sockets emptying out onto a yellow block of color on the page behind it. It is a photograph of an Ogoni mask, and it is credited to Eliot Elisofon’s 1958 book The Sculpture of Africa. In fact, photographs from Elisofon’s book hang above all the fiction and poetry published in this issue of The Atlantic. This photograph does not, it almost goes without saying, illustrate Achebe’s story, in which no mask explicitly appears, or the ethnic background of the author, which is Igbo. The connection appears to be purely visual: the mask is egg-shaped. Elisofon’s photographs of African art appeared on the pages of American magazines throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, and as these photographs circulated in the mass media they illustrated two different histories. First, they were intended to enhance American understanding of the African continent, its history, and its peoples during the era of decolonization. But because Elisofon also reanimated early-twentieth-century ideas of modernist primitivism, his photographs simultaneously illustrated modernism’s midcentury institutionalization in the United States. Understanding Elisofon’s photographs in this period thus requires historicizing them on the news-driven pages of LIFE, The Atlantic, and THINK (IBM’s in-house magazine). As Serge Guilbaut has memorably put it, New York stole the idea of modern art from Paris in this period, and Eliosofon’s photographs of African art were part of this appropriation: against the backdrop of African decolonization, they reenacted modernist primitivism for American consumption in the mass media. As a result, though they appear to be very much of their midcentury time period, Elisofon’s photographs in fact counteract the progressive temporality underlying American reporting on the emergence of new, independent nations in Africa and their relation to the ascendant global power of the United States. On the whole, then, this article is about tangled temporalities: there are multiple pasts in the midcentury present of Elisofon’s photographs; there is an inexorable sense of progress alongside clear evidence of stasis; there is repetition to the point of anachronism; yet there is very little of that form of temporality we call the future.

On June 1, 1963, J. P. Clark’s poem “Agbor Dancer” was recorded for the London-based Transcription Centre’s program Africa Abroad, an English-language radio magazine program distributed for broadcast on multiple African stations. Africa Abroad producer Lewis Nkosi praised the poem and recorded it in its entirety in his review of the anthology Poems from Black Africa, edited by Langston Hughes. In “Agbor Dancer,” the speaker watches a woman dance to drums and juxtaposes the dancer’s connection to “communal” identity through music and dance with the isolating effects of language and print. The poem, first published in print and then broadcast, describes West African aural and kinetic traditions while also using and referencing European literary traditions. What does it mean to take this poem, often read as a reflection on the alienating effects of print culture, and record it for radio broadcast instead of distributing it through print? Christopher Okigbo’s poem “Lament of the Drums,” which Okigbo read selections from and discussed on Africa Abroad in 1965, also explores the relationship between oral and print cultures. These two Anglophone Nigerian poets’ engagements with orality and print are productive sites from which to explore the role of radio in mid-century African literary cultures more broadly. In the case of “Agbor Dancer,” the radio broadcast remediates the written description of music and dance and accentuates the poem’s existing aural elements, including meter, rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, and assonance. Okigbo’s account of composing “Lament of the Drums” emphasizes his work’s synthesis of aurality and print and challenges cultural narratives that describe incommensurable differences between sound and print forms. Clark’s and Okigbo’s verse, read within the context of the Transcription Centre’s intermedial project of producing African literary programming, challenges media studies’ teleological account of a transition between the “primitive” and “typographic” that draws strict distinctions between orality and literacy. Drums, a common reference in postcolonial African verse, appear in each poem as a motif of indigenous cultural expression and communication through which Clark and Okigbo trace Africa’s changing mediascape in the mid-twentieth century. Radio technology, particularly in Africa, has been often compared to the drum, as both are used to communicate aurally across distance. The increasing affordability of radio sets in the mid-twentieth-century, the perception of Africa as “the oral continent par excellence,” and the development of programming from national, commercial, and overseas sources all contributed to the “overwhelming dominance” of radio as a medium. Radio broadcasting was established in Africa during the colonial period; by the 1960s, there was much interest within and outside of Africa in expanding radio access and programming in what Donald Browne terms a “postcolonial scramble for the ether.” Much of this programming was didactic and included political propaganda, religious proselytization, education, social reform, and anti-communism, but “radio was always far more multifaceted and slippery than was intended by the colonial powers.” Radio was taken up as an exciting tool to facilitate the distribution and discussion of literature in programs such as the BBC’s West African Voices and the Transcription Centre’s Africa Abroad; postcolonial writers’ voices were frequently on air through their literary pieces, interviews, and critical commentary. If, as Brian Larkin argues in Signal and Noise, “media technologies” such as radio played a key “role in producing what we call urban Africa,” radio also helped produce what we know as literary Africa. Clark’s and Okigbo’s poems draw from specific drum traditions (and in Okigbo’s case synthesize materials from multiple West African traditions); Africa Abroad programs, however, often return to the question of “the coherence and diversity of African identity.” In using Anglophone Nigerian poems to think about African literature and media studies, the goal of this paper is not to overgeneralize from these poets’ work, but instead to demonstrate how locally contextualized examples challenge certain mid-century claims about drums and orality while also acknowledging what oral literature scholars such as Isidore Okpewho have identified as “common features and customs” across the African continent. Clark’s and Okigbo’s poems do not directly theorize the role of radio in Africa, but “Agbor Dancer” and “Lament of the Drums” present the drum as a unique cultural form and sound communication technology with roots in the precolonial oral and musical traditions of West Africa. The poems and the paratextual material of the radio programs engage key questions of mid-century media studies while also resisting the Eurocentric assumptions underpinning the field’s cultural development narratives.

Those of us who work in traditions considered “global” within US and, to varying degrees, European academies are often pulled in two professional directions. On the one hand, many of us feel rightly accountable to a kind of work most welcome in area studies: granular, situated, concerned with historical depth over what can feel like untenable generalization. On the other, we feel the sting of exclusion from the field’s “big” conversations, and seek broad conceptual discussion of “the literary,” as such. Both impulses—as an Africanist, I think here of toggling between the African Studies Association and the MLA—have value. In the effort to entrench a globally conscientious modernism, though, I find their differences hard to split. Terms like “global modernity” often feel removed from the lives and locales that anchor aesthetic practices beyond a few transnational publishing houses. Neither an historically intertwined (whether network-based or world-systematic) nor a discrete, comparative approach to global modernist method feels quite right, and yet the challenge to find something that does (to modernists, at least) is perennially cast as urgent. Job and book titles aside, I have grown to see Global Northern takes on the “global” even within the “global Anglophone” field as an over-beat drum, stemming as they often do from a form of what Modernism/modernity readers might recognize as “ weak theory.” As David Ayers has written in his reponse to the Modernism/modernity special issue on weak theory, there is only so much one can do to inclusivize an exclusive position, which, like a maximally expansive modernism, “simultaneously claims and renounces its universality.

In many ways, the concept of translation has been at the heart of the global modernist project. In the canonical account of modernism first laid down by Hugh Kenner and his contemporaries, modernist translations of Chinese, Japanese, and Sanskrit texts were never really intended to jumpstart a “comparative poetics.” They were simply the raw materials that Pound, Yeats, and Eliot used to “rethink the nature of an English poem.” [1] Fast-forward 40 years, and such a statement seems to cut against...

On Friday, 11th May 1923, the New York Evening Post ran an article entitled “Conrad and Casement Hut Mates in Africa.” In it, the journalist John Powell detailed his encounter with Joseph Conrad and Conrad’s thoughts on his one-time friend, the former darling of the British Empire turned Irish nationalist rebel, Roger Casement. Conrad told Powell of “[h]is first impression of Casement”; a tale told “so vividly that it stands out with the clearness and blackness of a silhouette caught unexpectedly in a lonely place, casting a hint of ill omen.” Despite the earlier friendship that had existed between Casement and Conrad, in the profile of Casement drawn from Conrad’s words, Casement is an unknowable, malevolent figure: Conrad was running his boat down the sluggish river when a tall, gaunt figure rose against the perpendicular face of a dark bluff. Crouching behind him, in an attitude suggesting a perverted sort of worship, was his servant and at his heels were two black bulldogs. This sinister picture did not fade, for Casement remained always mysterious, and, after months of the close companionship necessitated by a hut in the wilderness, Conrad knew him no better.