Revolutionary Papers is a transnational research collaboration exploring 20th century periodicals of Left, anti-imperial and anti-colonial critical production. Read More
Reading Ethiopia in Radical South African Newspapers In this paper, I make a claim for Ethiopia as hidden or overlooked revolutionary trope in South African politics and letters and trace its inscription across selected examples of popular South African newspapers. In South Africa, the idea of Ethiopia has been an important site of pan-Africanist and […]
Historical connections in the Global South: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Cuban Anti-racist struggle for Democracy This paper reconstructs the connections between Du Bois and Cuban intellectuals within global south struggles for anti-racist democracies. The first section shows how Du Bois connections with Cuba occurred both at the level of intellectual collectives and through interpersonal […]
APSI (Agencia de Prensa y Servicios Informativos) was a news magazine focused on international issues. Its origins can be traced back to 1976, during the Chilean dictatorship. The magazine circulated in the Spanish language in Santiago de Chile, and as its success grew, it expanded to other cities. It was not until 1982 that it […]
Anticolonial Cultural Reconstruction: Periodicals in the Aftermath of Colonial Violence My talk will look at the literary and cultural journal as a vehicle in the (re)construction of culture, literature and popular education in the aftermath of colonial destruction. I will focus on the 1950-60’s anticolonial activities of two Palestinian periodicals, al-Jadid and al-Ittihad, while offering frames and queries […]
Casa de Las Americas and its transcontinental network in the years of 1970-1972 During the 1920s the primary medium for activities of the cultural, artistic and political left were journals and periodicals. They served as platforms for the vanguard(-isms) in general, directing attention to other groups, initiatives, and publications. They were a gathering point; a place […]
Schooling the nation through words: reading and writing in the Non-European Unity Movement, 1940s-1950s The production and circulation of newspapers, periodicals and pamphlets by members of the Anti-CAD, All-African Convention and the Non-European Unity Movement (as well as the Teachers’ League of South Africa and the Cape African Teachers’ Association) during the 1940s and 1950s […]
An exercise in free expression in revolutionary Ethiopia Abyotawi Medrek was a column published in in the Amharic newspaper Addis Zemen, during the early years of the Ethiopian revolution. It was a forum that came out in the Amharic daily, Addis Zemen that was the most widely circulated paper in the country. Abyotawi Medrek was […]
Published in Havana between 1936 and 1939, the magazine Mediodía (Midday) brought together Communists, socialists, and other progressives in the common battle against fascism, imperialism, and racism. In its editorial approach, it modeled the Communist International’s “Popular Front” strategy, adopted in 1935, of forging anti-fascist alliances beyond the ranks of the Communist movement itself. The […]
French, African, and Arab: Negotiating Post-Colonial Algerian Identity in Révolution Africaine Six months after Algeria won its independence, an unusual group of militants gathered in Algiers. Led by a Siamese-born French lawyer, Jacques Vergès, the group consisted of French and Algerian journalists, cartoonists, photographers, and militants. Their mission? To craft a new cultural and political […]
Counter Political: Networks of (miss)information: fighting against ‘general understanding’ The publications produced from exile during the period of the military dictatorships in Latin America show an advanced awareness of the ideological and political barriers produced by the distortion or invisibilization of certain facts by the media, co-opted by the dictatorial and neo-imperial powers. The FBI (Front […]
Leftist publications centred around political struggles and groups from the twentieth century had specific aims, and clear ideas of the audience and readership, largely due to the constraints on distribution at the time. This definition of audience and readership was at the centre of most anti-colonial and anti-imperialist publications. For them, publishing was an avenue […]
The Journal of Black Theology in South Africa and its Contribution to the Struggle for Liberation The Journal of Black Theology in South Africa was a bi-annual academic journal which ran from May 1987 until November 1998. In a context of legislated (at least initially) anti-black racism and repression, it sought to be “a vehicle […]
Digital resources for teaching and learning about revolutionary periodicals.
