Revolutionary Papers is a transnational research collaboration exploring 20th century periodicals of Left, anti-imperial and anti-colonial critical production. Read More
Small Magazines in Africa: Networks of Curation and Scalability Christopher Ouma and Madhu Krishnan The small magazine has held a significant but understudied effect on not only the project of imagining Africa in the long twentieth century, but also of articulating projects of solidarity, intimacy and political action. As a key node within larger ecologies […]
Pambana and Cheche were pamphlets and newspapers of the party organ of the December Twelve Movement (DTM) launched in May 1982. DTM emerged from an underground Marxist-Leninist worker’s political party established after the first conference of the Kenyan Marxists-Leninists in Nairobi on December 22-23 in 1974. Later in May 1982 the DTM launched the Pambana […]
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 […]
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 […]
Publica[c]tion: Publishing, an alternative and the creative process of critique OR, Publica[c]tion: Publishing and constituting an alternative Publica[c]tion is a Black student-driven publication – a collective process that includes but also transcends and goes beyond the independently, self-published product. Initiated in conversations at the end of 2015 as an attempt to extend and continue the […]
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 Evening News: Where Thought and Action Converge The Evening News was established by Dr. Kwame Nkrumah and the Convention People’s Party in 1948 and served as a vehicle to expose Ghanaians and Africans to Pan-African Consciousness. As the mouthpiece of the CPP, the paper spoke directly to three main constitutes‒members, the public and fellow […]
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 […]
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 […]
The Chinese translation and introduction of African literature in the journal of World Literature (1953-1966) The Chinese bimonthly journal World Literature (shijie wenxue,《世界文学》) was founded in 1953, run by the Chinese Writers’ Association. It was the only journal for translated literature in China before the 1970s. The journal was initially titled Translation (yiwen,《译 文》) [Fig.2] […]
Published first in December 1969, Black Land News formed the propaganda arm for the Black Land Movement (BLM) and its youth wing the Young Pioneers of New Africa (YPNA). Through their newspaper, published initially on a monthly basis and later shifting to biweekly, BLM sought to foster the rise of an independent Black nation from […]
“We reject the commercial and commodified form of cinema, just as we reject the societal order that produces such a cinema. Neither this form, nor this order, enables humanity to realise itself.” A year prior to Solanas and Getino’s “Towards A Third Cinema” (1969), a group of radical Turkish filmmakers and writers declared this in their new […]
Digital resources for teaching and learning about revolutionary periodicals.
