Casa de Las Americas and its transcontinental network in the years of 1970-1972

During the 1920s the primary medium for activities of the cultural, artistic and political left were journals and periodicals. They served as platforms for the vanguard(-isms) in general, directing attention to other groups, initiatives, and publications. They were a gathering point; a place for sharing artistic programs and discussions, political propaganda, public debates and confrontations with readers, as well as sites for collective efforts. In The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines (2013) Peter Brooker underlined the avant-garde practice as “networked exchange” across borders thanks to the role of periodicals, which shaped the global modernism.​

In my paper prepared for the workshop I intend to apply recent studies on 1920s avant-garde journals and periodicals to develop a discourse on transcontinental networks of the political, cultural and artistic Magazines that operated in the early 1970s in Latin America, Africa and Europe. I intend to discuss Casa de Las Americas from the years of 1970-1972. It was a period, when editors of this Cuban periodical devoted one of the numbers to Pan-African Festival in Algiers (1970, No. 58) and begun to advertise Souffles and AfricAsia directing attention to revolutionary circles in Rabat and Paris. I intend to discuss their contacts and situate them on the global and historical spectrum of revolutionary, left-wing, artistic, literary and avant-garde publications. I aim to explore the “networked exchange” of these three Magazines, which entered into transnational circulation and aimed to create a platform of transcontinental propaganda of solidarity for revolutionary movements in Africa, Asia and Latin America.