Panel 23: Anticolonial press in Western metropoles (EN)

Chairs:

Adelaide Vieira Machado, CHAM-NOVA FCSH

Sandra Ataíde Lobo, CHAM-NOVA FCSH

Twentieth-century anticolonialism as denounce and critic of colonialism, namely in what concerned the racist foundations of colonial and postcolonial societies, and as ongoing movement towards liberation, conjugated the critic of concrete colonial situations with vaster self-awareness and solidarities such as Negritude, Pan-Africanism or Afro-Asian ones, leading to the conceptualization of alternative worldviews, looks at the past and imagination of liberated futures. Significant part of the anticolonial intellectuals involved had in common their migrant and diasporic experience as many moved from colonies dominated by different empires to American and European metropolitan cities for education, economic or political reasons, while additionally those from the American continent and the Caribbean islands carried the inheritance of African enslaved diaspora. The impact of this moving condition of colonized intellectual elites created by colonial empires requires evaluation.

The cosmopolitan urban experience that allowed their encounter, close contact and common discussions, has raised a vast net of anticolonial periodicals aiming at discussing colonialism and propagating new ideas and forms of political-cultural intervention. Notwithstanding the difficulties in accessing collections for their marginality in Western and Eastern public spheres and frequent subjection to political persecution, these periodicals are capturing growing multidisciplinary interest for their importance to access the profile of anticolonial networks, as much as for their interest to a more open understanding of the history of anticolonial thinking, situating and recovering individual and collective contributions to the discussions moved by coeval environments. They are no less interesting to understand how they related with homeland societies and their intellectual networks. Still, frequently those periodicals continue to be less an object than a source for studies on the mentioned subjects. On the other hand, there is a need to consider the political and cultural importance of anticolonial diasporic intellectuals’ contributions to Western publications. This is a field of studies that needs to be expanded, as the study of these periodicals allows us to access, in a situated and pluralized manner, the evolving construction of anticolonial thought and ideas, the creation of alternative understandings to those conveyed by colonial discourses, and, ultimately, to accompany the resulting decolonisation of thinking.

The present panel aims at bringing to the front the study of such periodicals and contributions, welcoming studies, namely, but not exclusively on:

• Particular periodicals and comparative approaches;
• Exploration of intellectual and information networks;
• Situated intervention, readership and impact;
• Theorising approaches to the profile of anticolonial press;
• Internationalist solidarities.

Keywords: Anticolonial Press; Intellectual Networks; Intellectual Diasporas; Anticolonial Solidarities; Public Spheres