Abstract
This article compares changing imaginations of African nationalism, Pan-Africanism, and the black diaspora through the lens of literary genre in two popular magazines, South Africa’s Drum and its lesser-known contemporary from the Central African Federation, African Parade . As traveling literary systems that contain a variety of literary forms, popular magazines are useful for theorizing new relationships between genre and geography. In particular, I consider African Parade ’s use of interstitial “migrant forms” to map the simultaneously urban and rural, national and transnational contours of the federation. Migration is a thematic as well as a formal feature of these texts, which reconfigure narratives of permanent settlement in the city—a type of story that was popular in Drum and epitomized by the figure of the deterritorialized gangster, or tsotsi . By recasting the migrant as a figure who travels across categories (rural/urban, past/present, traditional/modern), African Parade expressed an alternative vision of the region’s shifting geographies and left a lasting impact on its literary forms.
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