Reading the paratext: posture and self-fashioning in African “little magazines”

Abstract

ABSTRACT Building on Genette’s work on the paratext as a liminal space between the text(s) and the world, where a hybrid discourse – at once social and literary – unfolds, the aim of this paper is to read African small magazines through their paratext. Front and back covers, editorials and illustrations play a key role in magazines’ self-presentation and “ensure the text's material presence in the world, its reception and consumption.” Shifting our gaze to their paratext, with examples ranging from Drum (1951–today) and Joe(1973–1979), Présence Africaine(1947–today), Black Orpheus(1957–1975), Okyeame (1960–1972) and Transition (1961–today) to contemporary magazines like Kwani?(2003–today), and Chimurenga(2002–today) we seek to analyse the two spaces they connect: the textual space within the periodicals and the extratextual space where metatextual discourses about them circulate. Using Meizoz's concept of “posture,” we seek to highlight ways in which paratextual elements participate in their positioning within the “rhizomatic configuration” of continental or pan-African magazines and within intersecting national, continental or global literary and cultural spaces. We argue that the posture(s) and “literary identities” of small magazines emerge from processes of programmatic and dialogic (self-)fashioning whose traces are visible in paratextual elements.