Leap Day Bulaq: ‘Little Magazines’
Bulaq Episode 44 — “Little Magazines” — dropped this past Thursday:
In it, ArabLit’s M Lynx Qualey and her co-host Ursula Lindsey talk about the landscape and history of independent publishing in the region, our own experiences working for and launching publications, the conundrum of funding, and the magic of little magazines.
From the show notes:
This episode is partly inspired by an exhibition at the MMAG Foundation in Amman: How to Reappear Through the Quivering Leaves of Independent Publishing
The exhibition was curated by the publishing platform Kayfa ta, founded by artists Maha Maamoun and Ala Younis
Here is a review by Kaelen Wilson-Goldie of the same exhibition when it took place in Beirut
The exhibition featured the work of the Post-Apollo Press, among others
Some of the contemporary magazines mentioned in this episode are: Rusted Radishes, Bidayat, Qadita, Ma3azef, The Public Source, Raseef22, Nejma, Mada Masr, 7iber, as well as comix collectives: Skefkef, Samandal, Toktok, Garage, Fanzeen, Lab 619
The Moroccan magazine Souffles / Anfas, published from 1966 to 1971, was a hugely influential experiment
Zahia Rahmani and other scholars at the French Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art have created an eye-opening archive of non-European critical and cultural magazines
City of Beginnings: Poetic Modernism in Beirut, by Robyn Creswell (2019) is “an intellectual history of Lebanon during the early Cold War” that focuses on the magazine Shi’r (“Poetry”)
Another Lebanese magazine, Hiwar, was (in)famously funded by the CIA.