Shifting Fields: Imagining Literary Renewal in Itinerário and Drum

This article looks at the beginnings of anti-apartheid/anticolonial literary cultures in Johannesburg and Maputo (then Lourenço Marques) after the Second World War. It pays specific attention to the ways in which they attempted to harness aesthetics of "newness." By focusing on the influential journals Drum (1951–) and Itinerário (1941–1955), I argue that both journals tapped into transnational intellectual currents such as Harlem Renaissance writing, but that the discrete discursive networks of English and Portuguese contributed to a differentiation of their aesthetic approaches. Itinerário acted out an avantgarde-like resistance to bourgeois/colonial culture. Drum was market-driven and achieved in its early phase a compromise between a racially circumscribed mass-cultural appeal and the literate ideals of mission-educated South African blacks. These differences can then be factored into an analysis of persistent differences between the literatures of South Africa and Mozambique.