Reading Art Worlds in Small Print: Prismatic Combinations of Literature and Visual Art in South African Little Magazines 1960s to 1970s

Over two years, I will investigate the various forms that encounters between writers and visual artists take within the pages of local small-scale periodicals or “little magazines” in South Africa between the early 1960s and the late 1970 available in archives at Rhodes University and Amazwi.

Its main aim is to uncover entangled histories of encounter of writers and visual artists and map the dynamics, political and aesthetic positioning of various cultural formations clustering around the magazines.

An analysis of the forms encounters in the magazines will be undertaken by using visual verbal methodology and scholarship on visual art and materiality.

Another aim is to understand how the cultural groups in question engage in projects of “world-making” as they actively imagine locality and the world in terms of gender, racial and aesthetic strategy.

Methodology derived from African periodical studies, world literature and South African art history will be used to analyze a corpus of 16 rare postcolonial magazines.

The use of archival material otherwise unavailable or incomplete outside of the Southern African repositories is a distinctive feature of the project. In the short term, I will describe artist writer encounters in four case studies to be published as articles.

In the long term, I want to incentivize the archives holding this material to digitize their holdings, so that larger scale projects on South Africa, world literature and visual art might become possible.