Marina Bilbija

Marina Bilbija comes from Wesleyan University, where she is an assistant professor and where teaches and writes about Afro-diasporic print culture in the long nineteenth century. Her work has appeared in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Oxford Bibliographies, the South Atlantic Review, and Modern Fiction Studies. Professor Bilbija has perhaps travelled the farthest to be with us, having taken her baccalaureate at the University of Sarajevo and her graduate degrees at Penn. Her talk, drawn from her ongoing project, Print Worlds of Color: Periodical Networks and the Making of a Black Anglosphere, examines a rich culture of reprinting, mutual citation, and correspondence between black newspaper editors in the UK, US, and Anglophone West Africa. Today she focuses specifically on the relationship between the Anglo-African Magazine and Weekly Anglo-African published out of the US and the Lagos Anglo-African. By reading the three Anglo-Africans together, Bilbija highlights the provisional uses of not only the “Anglo-African,” but also “Anglo” across Afro-diasporic publications. She’ll be arguing that the serial publication cycle of these magazines enabled both the production of unbounded black internationalist collectivities referred to as “Anglo-African” in New York and their refraction and recalibration in Lagos.

Posted in Past Presenters