Black Possibility: Small Magazines and Pan-African Imagination - Prof. Chris Ouma

Session Description

Mid-century Africa was a time full of the promise of freedom. It was also a time in which the 'freedom dreams’ of Africa intersected with those of its diasporas in powerful ways. While statist institutions emerged to embody the realization and future of these dreams, various print cultures created platforms for engendering a pan-African imagination that would bring together anti-colonial resistance, civil rights, and anti-apartheid imagination, towards the new age of decolonization. In this talk, I argue that the small magazine embodies mid-century Africa as a time and space of global black possibility through its curation of pan-African imagination.

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Speaker Biography

Christopher Ouma is an Associate Professor of English at Duke University with a secondary appointment in African and African American Studies.  He is the author of Childhood in Contemporary Diasporic Africa Literature: Memories and Futures Past (2020) and co-editor of Spoken Word Project: Stories travelling through Africa (2014). He is working on a monograph on small magazines and Pan-African imagination in mid-century Africa. In addition, he is co-editing a collection on Black Archival Imagination forthcoming with Duke University Press and co-directs a Duke Franklin Humanities Institute Lab with the same name.