This article compares changing imaginations of African nationalism, Pan-Africanism, and the black diaspora through the lens of literary genre in two popular magazines, South Africa's Drum and its lesser-known contemporary from the Central African Federation, African Parade. As traveling literary systems that contain a variety of literary forms, popular magazines are useful for theorizing new relationships between genre and geography. In particular, I consider African Parade's use of interstitial "migrant forms" to map the simultaneously urban and rural, national and transnational contours of the federation. Migration is a thematic as well as a formal feature of these texts, which reconfigure narratives of permanent settlement in the city-a type of story that was popular in Drum and epitomized by the figure of the deterritorialized gangster, or tsotsi. By recasting the migrant as a figure who travels across categories (rural/urban, past/present, traditional/ modern), African Parade expressed an alternative vision of the region's shifting geographies and left a lasting impact on its literary forms.
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