The Portail Mondial des Revues/Global Journals Portal of the French Institut national d’histoire de l’art (INHA) comprises a collection of over one thousand decolonial and diasporic periodicals spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Often ephemeral and with brief publication histories, these journals offer glimpses into the literary critical and social critical practices of their times.
Publications in the database can be filtered by geographical area, language, and topic (literature, gender studies, diaspora, etc.). For those that are open access, links are provided directly inside the database. Each entry contains a list of articles and books that have recently cited the journal, allowing scholars easy access to critical work surrounding each publication.
At the core of the collection are works published in Paris, particularly during the entre-guerres period, that convey the voices of migrant and diasporic communities. Among these are journals such as the anti-imperialist Phản-Đế (1934), published by the Ligue contre l’impérialisme et l’oppression coloniale, and Césaire and Senghor’s L’Étudiant noir (1935). Many publications such as L’Arche (1944-1948), with joint editions from both Paris and Algiers, publish literary texts from around the world, placing them alongside reflections on contemporaneous philosophical and political debates.
Works span across several dozen languages and every continent of the globe. Publications such as the Catalan El Cami and the Haitian Bon Nouvèl account for just two of many periodicals published in minority languages and creoles. Other publications offer transnational and multilingual perspectives such as the Franco-uruguayan Entregas de la Licorne and Tricontinental, a social critical periodical published through the Organization for Solidarity of the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
Cameron Flynn