Magazine Manifestoes: The formation of Third World Literary Aesthetics through the Magazine Format.

Abstract

The development of anti-colonial resistance in South Asia is closely linked to the proliferation of print technology in the region. Towards the closing decades of colonialism, with the publication of Angarey and the formation of the Progressive Writers’ Association, a new aesthetic of social realism was introduced to the anti-imperial rhetoric of literary magazines. This paper studies the interaction of South Asian social realism with other such literary traditions  of social realism in Afro-Asia leading to the formation of the Afro-Asian Writers’ Association in 1958 and its journal Lotus, in 1968.

Further, it analyses the contributions by South Asian writers to Lotus and magazines within South Asia to study the role of the magazine print format in the formation of these aesthetics. The magazine format is an unique window to the development of the anti-imperialist, socialist, social realism of literary cultures of Afro-Asia in the Global South. In editorials, critical reviews, essays (like the “study” section in the Lotus) the magazine format offers a perspective on the execution of  project of creating a common literary aesthetic for the Third World that could facilitate an imagination of South-South solidarity in the decolonial moment.

In this paper, I investigate these materialities and the possibilities offered by magazine format- in South Asia and in the Lotus – to study a connected history of the development of the aesthetic of decolonization in the in Afro-Asia. This decenters the figure of various authors, poets, and literary groups celebrated in these geographies for revolutionizing and modernizing their literary traditions, to situate them as interconnected nodes of a translocal network. Print technologies, Cold War politics, materialities of magazines, and literary personalities interact with each other in the development of this aesthetic towards the formation of what Hala Halim has called an alternative World Literature.