“Small Readers” and Big Magazines: Reading Publics in Bingo, La Vie Africaine, and Awa: la revue de la femme noire

This article offers sociohistorical engagement with readers’ letters printed in three glossy Francophone African magazines (Bingo, La Vie Africaine, and Awa: La revue de la femme noire) produced from the early 1950s to the 1980s. It argues for a methodological foregrounding of readers’ experiences “in and of themselves” (Musila), in order to assert the connective and collective role of intellectual labor within pan-African public spheres in this period. Drawing on analysis of readers’ letters and interviews with leading figures involved in each magazine, the article is structured in three parts: first an overview of the three magazines and their relative political positions, followed by sociological analysis of a database of 212 readers’ letters from the three titles covering the year 1964 (with a particular focus on gender), and lastly closer reading of a selection of a selection of these letters and the affective dimensions of “distant reading” they evoke and solicit, notably through requests for pen pals.