Reading the Periphery.org started from an academic research project, initially aimed at gathering narratives from European visitors in South America and Africa over the 20th century. The project then developed into a wider scope of amalgamating essays on colonialism, post-colonialism, and travel journalism reports, sociological and historical analyses, and other forms of literary accounts.

Although we do not claim to be a magazine or journal, Reading the Periphery.org aims to inform readers on north-south relations. The central idea is that everyone should access many kinds of criticism and descriptions on colonialism, on different levels of complexity. By aligning distinct and sometimes contradictory interpretations of places and periods of time, it is expected that not only Western discourses of superiority and primacy are dismantled, but colonization is laid bare. Not as a binary, but as an uneven flow of ideas that deserve a recalibration, as Stuart Hall argued. We wish to keep this debate alive, problematizing the often uninformed, anachronistic, and mystical gaze of the world’s north toward the south or vice-versa.

Reading the periphery.org is also interested in the tension that arises from encounters between European and non-European subjects, finding how these experiences are narrated. Our research effort focuses on different cycles, mainly covering ties between Europe and South America or Africa, and yet we are happy to incorporate material from elsewhere in the future. Ideally, by forging an improbable link between a number of accounts, we approximate the center from what is said to be “the periphery” of the world, hence recognizing how close we are from each other.

We are currently doing our best to locate authors and print houses, and authorize the publication of all excerpts. In any case, all sources are acknowledged at the end of each text.

If you have any question, comment, or suggestion of new articles, we want to hear from you.

Helton Levy – Editor