South Asian Review

Technologies of Belonging: The Periodical in South Asian Literary and Cultural Histories

Beyond the conventional categorization of ‘little magazines’ and ‘mainstream journals,’ book historians of South Asia have found periodicals to be archives of manifold identities and collectivities, such as those constituted by college magazines, science periodicals, proletarian magazines, caste journals, underground pamphlets, and children’s papers to name only a few. This special issue explores these diverse technologies of belonging to map socio-cultural affinities that were created and sustained by South Asian periodicals and the practices surrounding them across the 19th and 20th centuries. Thus–as the Urdu language publication Biswin Sadi sought to reform literary taste, or Chand used its special issues to draw attention to contemporary political issues such as capital punishment or caste among its Hindi readers, or the Bengali radio magazine Betar Jagat created space for an engagement with emergent technologies–the periodical has consistently shaped the limits of literary, political, and infrastructural sensibilities in the region. The multilingual, multigenre, and multimedial engagements of the periodical generated new publics in national and transnational contexts.

 However, conventional literary and cultural histories of South Asia tend to overlook the significance of the form as an originary point for canonical as well as avant-garde cultural impulses, perhaps because of the ephemerality of its material existence, or the irregularity of its appearance across time, or its affiliation with low or middlebrow cultures. By contrast, this special issue looks to situate the periodical as a literary object of abiding value, with author-editor figures, navigating experimental aspirations and the limits of print infrastructure. The periodical has also operated as a major site of generic developments and inventiveness within South Asian literature: be it the formal transformations of shorter genres such as the short story or poetry over time, or the unwieldy nature of novels that are published nearly unaltered at the end of their serialized printing in a periodical. This special issue asks how periodicals offered South Asian users a new stage to perform their roles as producers, designers, and consumers of a multifaceted form with an uncertain future, and their entwinement with emergent technologies of print and beyond. Simply put, this issue is keen to see “what journals do to people and what people can do with journals” (Ahmad, Benson, and Morgenstern).

Since their colonial beginnings, periodicals have cleared a space for dissent and debate while also surviving censorship and authoritarianism. From articulating female agency (Dubrow, Mandhwani), to commercializing the book market (Ghosh, Joshi, Anjaria), to charting multiple and peripheral modernities (Nerlekar, Zechhini), and forging regional and national languages (Orsini, Gupta, Chakrabarty), the form has captivated the interest of South Asian scholars across disciplines, geographies, and temporalities. By turning to the periodical, we also hope to uncover patterns of circulation that traverse generic, formal, territorial, affective, and ideological boundaries. We take the periodical to be both the object being explored as well as the analytic for understanding colonial and postcolonial modernity. The pages archive not only text but a layering of experiences and practices of a region coming to terms with itself as simultaneously local and global, and it is this repository that we aim to foreground.

Contributors are invited to explore the following themes, but are not limited to:

●       Periodical and / as literature (genre, form, experimentation, etc)

●       Periodicals rooted specifically to a locale/community/group (eg. caste journals, dialect-specific magazines, chapbooks with limited print, community zines, etc)

●       Networks of modernism (eg. little magazines, avant-garde aesthetics)

●       Political periodicals (organizational publications, ideological positions, etc)

●       Construction of literary taste and citizenship (eg. mainstream or middlebrow magazines)

●       Desires and pleasures (gender, advertisements, consumption, pulp, games, etc)

●       Print and other Technologies (multimedial engagements, infrastructures, etc)

●       Democratizing voice and access (form and circulation, finances, materialities)

●       Countering state-sponsored narratives (resistance, banning, and underground journals)

●       Global world-making (translations, transregional news, letters etc)