Of Worlds Black and Red: South Africa's Poet Laureates and Their World-Making Networks

Concentrating on the first two national poet laureates of democratic South Africa, Mazisi Kunene and Keorapetse Kgositsile, this article investigates the readings that may be elicited in putting them in conversation with their exilic interlocutors in the context of the Cold War. Bringing their literary historiography into focus reveals the political and aesthetic networks they created in the black diaspora and in their relationship with Eastern Europe. Central to this study are the black and red periodical cultures, publication avenues, and understudied cultural venues that produce a generative reading of how black radical traditions and particular histories of nationalism intersect with those of socialist internationalism, pan-Africanism, and Soviet modernity. They demonstrate a rich production and dissemination of South African literature through anticolonial and anti-imperialist networks of exchange, collaboration, and translation. Through the scrutiny of these materials and relationships, it is possible to establish a triangulating model that eschews a "counterculture to modernity" born in the northern Atlantic, thus rebutting a vertical North-to-South influence that is common in transnational readings. By decentering the northern metropoles, I contend that Euromodernity has blinded itself to other forms of modernity and that has overdetermined its influence as universal. Thus, the universal can be claimed from any cultural position, but can never be owned. Upon close inspection of the South-to-South transcontinental and transracial networks detailed in this study, it is possible to delineate new literary histories of the Global South to demonstrate how we may "provincialize Europe."