Parallel Session 5.

Chair: Evanghelia Stead

This panel takes the opportunity of the Budapest conference on “Challenging Geopolitical and Social ‘Centres’ and ‘Peripheries’” to further Fionnualla Dillane's suggestion in considering “how ‘Europe’ is mediated, constructed, ‘invented’, exported, and imposed in the periodical and newspaper press.” The issue was briefly raised at the roundtable discussion on future European Periodical Research 2020–30 during the 2021 ESPRit conference in Bochum and solicited views of European periodical research from a more global perspective. Exploring such a trail, this panel invites reflection on the hegemony of traditional European centres and disruptive counter-forces through the agency of periodicals in three ways: within Europe, as periodicals published off-centre powerfully rework the cultural and political agenda of established capitals (Elisa Grilli); from the cultural seat of European Maghrebi colonies, as “transnational, trans-historical, and multilingual” periodicals comparatively negotiate “a Mediterranean, Arab, and Islamic heritage” (Hoda El Shakry); and from the perspective of Near East and Egyptian periodicals on the occasion of the historic opening of the Suez canal, introducing from 1869 a “global capitalist simultaneity” and shifting discourses (Elizabeth M. Holt). Seemingly different, the three papers meet on geographic, linguistic, cultural and political concerns as periodicals progressively challenge a hierarchical European model through critical shifts.

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Elisa Grilli

When peripheral magazines dream of becoming centres: The Evergreen (Edinburgh) and Poesia (Milan)

This paper explores how journal editors in vibrant yet “peripheral” cities such as Edinburgh and Milan exerted an international influence on art and culture through two periodicals exemplifying transnational networks of men, ideas, texts, images and magazines. Deemed “peripheral,” they presented themselves as original editorial experiments that offered innovative and hybrid spaces for renewal by reaching beyond not only political, but also linguistic borders and cultural conceptions of form, including the mainstream press. On the one hand, The Evergreen (1895–1896/7) editors, gathered around Patrick Geddes (and anarchist groups), sought to challenge the cultural dominance of London and its periodicals by re-promoting the Scottish capital as well as an anarchist and cosmopolitan ideal. On the other, using the Parisian stage, the editors of Poesia rivista internazionale (1905-9) gathered around F. T. Marinetti and sought to raise Milan to the rank of the new cultural centre of the Italian avant-garde. The paper will examine to what extent registration in a centre provides a magazine with an identity and how a peripheral cultural project may become a tool in the construction of cultural hubs beyond national centres. Investigating these two projects side-by-side shows how they were able to play off the artistic and media-driven complementarity offered by the articulation of different national and transnational scales.

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Hoda El Shakry

Re-worlding through Maghrebi cultural journals

This paper explores how twentieth-century cultural journals in the region of the Maghreb (Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco) disrupted the geopolitics of center and periphery by operating outside of the dominant logics of colonial mediation. Relying upon material networks of production, financing, and distribution that circumvented the hegemonic centers of European cultural capital, they staged alternative world imaginaries across the content of their pages and intended readerships. My presentation focuses primarily on the Tunisian periodical al-ʿAlam al-Adabī (The Literary World, 1930–1936), which oriented itself around a populist vision of nationalist culture in conversation with world literary trends and debates. One of the earliest regional examples of a robust comparative literary methodology, the journal was invested in cementing a Tunisian cultural identity around a Mediterranean, Arab, and Islamic heritage that was at once transnational, transhistorical, and multilingual. My paper contextualizes al-ʿAlam al-Adabī alongside later print culture projects within the region – such as the bilingual (French/Arabic) Moroccan Marxist-Leninist cultural journal Souffles-Anfas (Breaths, 1966–1972) – committed to forging internationalist solidarity networks with decolonizing efforts across Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

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Elizabeth Holt

Africa has now become an island: The Suez Canal and the Arabic periodical press

“Africa ... has now become an island,” announced the Beirut journal Al-Jinān, heralding the 1869 opening of the Suez Canal in its first issue. Buṭrus al-Bustānī began publishing the new journal in Arabic in January of 1870 alongside a twice-weekly newspaper Al-Jannah, as Beirut's port was becoming simultaneous with the temporality of the capitalist world order, as European empire increasingly eclipsed the Ottoman. Al-Jannah listed exchange rates, prices of basic commodities, schedules of ships expected in Beirut's port, and incoming telegraphs with updates on world news, ratcheting Arabic into a new global regime of finance capital and speculation plotted on steam ship routes.  As ships passed now from the Atlantic to the Indian Oceans through the Mediterranean and Suez, they severed Africa from Asia.  The coal-fuelled steam-powered machinery of nineteenth-century global capitalist simultaneity would meet its rejoinder with the calls for Afro-Asian solidarity at the 1955 Bandung Conference, and with Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser's 1956 nationalization of the Suez Canal, taking shape in the trilingual publication of Afro-Asian Writings/Lotus from Cairo.  This paper considers the question of centers and peripheries by juxtaposing shifting discourses on the Suez Canal, an axis along which to observe the African continent's enclosures and alignments in the nineteenth and twentieth-century Arabic press.