Artistic and cultural movements

The Global Journals Portal aims to contribute to the construction of a global history of critical and cultural journals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As such, inventoried publications have a double vocation, which stems from a dialogue between struggles for emancipation and transnational cultural trends.

This database lists 298 journals for art, 491 for literature and 126 for poetry. Those publications cross major cultural trends of modernity and invest them with ideas and demands for political self-determination, as with the desire to establish communication and exchange platforms on a global scale.

These trends range from romanticism and liberal republicanism to the positivisms of the second half of the nineteenth century, from the modernist avant-garde to the cultural experiments of the postcolonial world. Writing is without a doubt the privileged exercise for this medium, but we also find many visual art journals, as well as some specializing in photography, architecture, cinema, music, which use satire with creativity or adopt resolutely militant tones. Written in 99 different languages, they mark contact zones in a world of shifting borders, in which transnational cultural practices fuel the globalization of struggles against the development of economic imperialism. They are the carriers of a deep sensitivity towards the wars and traumas of modernity, and manifest contemporary tensions between nationalism and internationalism, between avant-garde and heritage promotion, between modernism (and even a cult of progress) and anti-colonialism.

The publications gathered in this database are the fruit of editorial undertakings which make art a politically productive domain of human experience. They put into circulation individual works of art and writing that express and question the experience of collective dynamics.