01
Journals & editorial platforms
Runs, individual issues and special numbers preserve editorial programmes, contributor networks, translation practices and the formation of intellectual publics.
The collection
Documents of production, circulation, and institutional life.
The archive contains books, journals, letters, photographs, recordings, catalogues, posters, playbills and institutional records relating principally to the period 1930–1980.
These materials are collected not as isolated examples of literary or artistic achievement, but as evidence of the relationships and systems through which modernism acquired form, audience and durability.
What the collection holds
Material forms that preserve different kinds of work.
No single medium contains the complete history of a network. Different documentary forms preserve different parts of the same process.
02
Correspondence & association copies
Letters, inscriptions, inserts and presentation copies identify recipients, establish directions of exchange and preserve publication before the finished book.
03
Publishers & institutions
Catalogues, directories, conference proceedings, reports and institutional publications reveal how cultural work was financed, organised, taught and made durable.
04
Performance, theatre & sound
Scripts, playbills, recordings, production editions, notation and publicity photographs document the conversion of performance into print, sound and touring history.
05
Exhibitions & festivals
Catalogues, posters, programmes, photographs and official books preserve the temporary arrangements through which cultural fields became publicly visible.
06
Photographs & working archives
Original prints, stamps, captions and annotations retain traces of documentary labour, professional circulation and the selection of images for later use.
Chronology
Overlapping processes across a core period.
The decades provide orientation rather than a linear sequence. Earlier mechanisms of extraction and metropolitan mediation remained active as new editorial, institutional and African-centred capacities developed. Earlier and later material may also enter when it documents the genealogy or afterlife of an institution active during the core period.
1930s
Extraction and mediation
Ethnographic collection, colonial classification and avant-garde publication establish the unequal systems through which African cultural forms entered international modernist discourse.
1940s
Reciprocal address and wartime circulation
Association copies, correspondence, exile journals and translation networks register a shift from observation toward dialogue, negotiation and lateral exchange.
1950s
Institutional consolidation and visual translation
Présence Africaine, congresses, publishing programmes and exhibition publications give recurring structure to previously dispersed relationships.
1960s
African-centred production and continental platforms
Ibadan, Oshogbo, Ife, Kampala, Nairobi and Dakar sustain local publication, performance, university exchange and large-scale cultural staging.
1970s
Expansion, festivals and documentary afterlives
Regional journals, exhibition circuits, FESTAC and production editions demonstrate increased institutional scale while preserving new forms of omission and mediation.
Selected geographic nodes
A polycentric field rather than a centre and its peripheries.
The collection follows routes of correspondence, publishing, translation, exhibition, education and performance. Metropolitan systems remain visible, but they do not determine the whole map.
ParisFort-de-FranceAlgiersNew YorkBuenos Aires / La PlataCairoIbadanOshogbo / IfeKampalaNairobiDakarLagos
Explore the network map →The public catalogue
Selected records from a larger controlled census.
The internal census supports collections management, research and publication planning. It is not automatically a public catalogue. Records appear online only when their descriptions, rights status and representative media have passed object-level review.
Public records do not disclose purchase prices, dealer information, private provenance notes, insurance values, preservation-master paths or restricted research files.
Enter the catalogue