Revolutionary Papers is a transnational research collaboration exploring 20th century periodicals of Left, anti-imperial and anti-colonial critical production. Read More
Translating the Revolution, Imagining Independence in Tunisia: Perspectives Tunisiennes and al-‘āmil al-tūnsī (1963-1974) Tunisia’s post-French colonial era was dominated by the political and social imagination of the one, President Habib Bourguiba, and his vision for a bourgeois colonial modernity. The most resilient voice of opposition (political and cultural) came from university campuses, and a nebulous […]
From 1971 to 1973, the nascent grassroots political organization known as Kokua Hawaii independently published and distributed Huli, a semiregular newspaper featuring radical economic analysis, community news, organizing strategies, political education, social documentary photography, and illustrated agitprop graphics. Kokua Hawaii, based on Oʻahu and active across the Hawaiian islands, was influenced by legacies of militant […]
‘Overthrow the capitalist system of Government and usher in a co-operative Commonwealth one’: the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union of Africa (ICU), the Workers’ Herald, and dreams of revolution, 1923-1929. Abstract: The Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union of Africa (ICU) and its charismatic leader Clements Kadalie dominated the Southern African political landscape of the 1920s. […]
The journal Al-Fatah (“The Victory” in Arabic) published in Karachi, Pakistan from May 1970 till approximately July 1990. The periodical was produced in Urdu in the two decades it was distributed and became a major supporter of Pakistan People’s Party (PPP). The journal Al-fatah was largely socialist in terms of political inclination and critical of […]
In the wake of uMkhonto we Sizwe’s (MK) ‘Mkatashinga Mutiny’ in Angola (1983-1984) and the Congress Alliance’s Kabwe Conference (1985), the ANC’s Department of Political Education (DPE), expressed a need to provide sustained and substantive political education for MK cadres based in Angola. According to the DPE, the reasons for the mutiny – three separate […]
The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), an armed Marxist-Leninist Palestinian national movement, used its weekly Arabic-language organ, al-Hadaf (The Target), to demonstrate its revolutionary analytical acumen on a variety of topics, including contemporary international affairs, political theory, Zionism, and women’s liberation. However, in addition to this rich spectrum of subjects, al-Hadaf always […]
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 […]
The Namibian Review: A Journal of Contemporary South West African was first published in 1976 and came out over a decade of intensities of armed struggle and fierce debates about forms of the postcolonial future. Initially it was produced by the Namibian Review Group (known as the Swedish Namibian Association) and 14 editions were printed […]
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 […]
In 2012/2023, eight print issues of KATAMAT were produced by Girifna activists, amounting to approximately 80,000 copies distributed in different cities across Sudan. KATAMAT (which comes from the word mute is also a youth slang for a protest or an arrest campaign) was between 2-4 A4 pages and it was born following the 2012/2013 protest […]
Given the importance of literature to various forms of social cohesion, it is not surprising that the European and U.S. empires that have dominated the geopolitical existence of the insular Caribbean have not readily invested in literary infrastructure throughout the archipelago. The impact of empire on infrastructure for the production of Caribbean literatures remains underexamined […]
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 […]
Digital resources for teaching and learning about revolutionary periodicals.
