The literary magazine, however fragile and limited as infrastructure, offered Caribbean writers a way to publish at home and to be circulated both at home and abroad. They made the careers of writers such as George Lamming, Derek Walcott, and Suzanne and Aimé Césaire, Alejo Carpentier, Nicolás Guillén, and many others. They made these careers by alternating between aesthetically launching the Caribbean into literary and geopolitical visibility and facilitating circulation to larger scale infrastructures in literary centers in Paris, London, Madrid, New York, and Mexico City.

Although my research is broader, I draw specifically on the following literary periodicals:

1. Tropiques (Fort de France, Martinique, 1941-1945)

Language: French (and some Kreyol)

Type: quarterly, no advertisements, subject to Vichy censorship for half-run, mostly literary publication including French literary works alongside local work and scattered work in translation from Spanish, includes literary and social theory fomenting black consciousness and increasingly evincing a Marxist political perspective, especially in second half  of run

Circulation: French Antilles, Haiti, Cuba, Curaçao, Mexico, New York, Alexandria, Chile, Venezuela

Editorial Collective: Aimé Césaire, Suzanne Césaire, René Ménil

2. BIM (Bridgetown, Barbados, 1942-1972)

Language: English (and various local dialects)

Type: semi-annual exclusively literary and programmatically apolitical periodical, financed by advertisements, demonstrating colonial self-censorship, dedicated to local literary production and becoming increasingly regional in scope in the late 1940s

Circulation: British West Indies and England

Editorial Collective: Frank Collymore & W. Therold Barnes with scouting work by George Lamming

3. Gaceta del Caribe (Habana, Cuba 1944)

Language: Spanish

Type: monthly, popular front literary critical and political periodical secretly financed by Cuban CP

Circulation: Haiti, Curaçao, Mexico, U.S., Venezuela, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay

Editorial Collective: Nicolás Guillén, Mirta Aguirre, Jose Antonio Portuondo, Angel Augier

This paper considers two periodicals published by black radical activists in the United States during the “New Negro” era of the early 20th century. Amid the outbreak of World War I, the Russian Revolution, and the stirring of anti-colonial movements in the global South, black Americans struggled to find new strategies for their liberation. This period in the U. S. was characterized by virulent Jim Crow segregation and discrimination, widespread racial violence, and the resulting “great migration” that fueled the movement of millions of black people from the rural South and the Caribbean to the urban North and West. Out of this maelstrom emerged a generation of New Negro Militants who deployed the press as a critical tool for organizing and critique. They forged a black radical imagination through print culture that, in keeping with the themes of this workshop, supported a black counter-public, alternative forms of cultural expression, and transnational projects.

​The Messenger was founded in 1917 by A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen, young migrants from the South who sought intellectual and political inspiration in Harlem. They found it in the burgeoning Socialist Party which actively sought black participation in the quest for universal brotherhood. The Messenger brought together artists, poets, journalists, and activists who linked black American’s condition with the rapacity of empire and capitalism, and with the cause of anti-colonialism. Over time the magazine shifted its emphasis from socialist transformation to advocacy for black solidarity through trade unions. The Crusader, created by Caribbean-born activist Cyril Briggs in 1918, was a monthly magazine that blended black nationalism with Communist Party doctrine in calls for autonomy and self-determination. Briggs established The Crusader to “promote the idea of self-government for the Negro and Africa for the Africans,” he wrote in an early issue. Briggs is best known for his leadership of the African Blood Brotherhood (ABB) founded in 1919, a quasi-secret society linked to the Communist Party that advocated armed self-defense. The Crusader would become the ABB’s official organ in 1921. The two magazines debated—often virulently — the merits of black nationalism vs. interracial cooperation while also sharing an overlapping network of editors and contributors who moved among ideological camps. In the process these periodicals created and sustained a radical black public sphere. These editors and their periodicals grappled with the same challenges as their 21st century counterparts — state repression, lack of resources, and disagreements within their communities.

In this paper, I will explore the concept of community in relation to publishing practices through the PFLP bulletin, a 1970s-1980s English-language monthly magazine published by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). The aim of the bulletin was to present the political line of the PFLP, to provide current information and analysis of the struggle at a local, national and international level, and as a tool to build solidarity amongst similar liberation movements around the world. This role in forming networks and an alternative platform for debate and critique fits into the stream “Counter-Institutional: The Material Histories of Periodicals”.

Through an analysis of the layout design, language and content in digital versions of these issues found online and building on the discussion that I began in an article titled “A platform for third world solidarity: thePopularFrontfor the Liberation of Palestine bulletin”published inThe Funambulist (Issue 22), the paper discusses the role and influence of publishing practices in the twentieth century. It grapples with questions of relevance of publishing these types of publications now, and outlines some lessons we can draw on today from the community and solidarity building activities developed through the PFLP Bulletin.