Revolutionary Papers is a transnational research collaboration exploring 20th century periodicals of Left, anti-imperial and anti-colonial critical production. Read More
The Messenger, The Crusader and The Radical Black Imagination in the Early 20th Century This paper considers two periodicals published by black radical activists in the United States during the “New Negro” era of the early 20th century. Amid the outbreak of World War I, the Russian Revolution, and the stirring of anti-colonial movements in […]
Haq Katha: Islamic Socialism in South Asian Print Culture In 1972, the front-page headline of second issue of Haq Katha (True Word) read: “Whose freedom – the have-nots or the courtiers and bureaucrats?” The headline caused outrage, condemnation and censorship as well as a murmuring amongst Bangladeshis. Between 1972-5, the weekly Haq Katha, published by Maulana Bhashani, […]
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 […]
Congress Militant: The paper as a revolutionary organiser Congress Militant, paper of the Marxist Workers’ Tendency (MWT) of the ANC, was published between the late 1980s and 1996 (when it was replaced by Socialist Alternative). As the more propagandistic accompaniment to the theoretic journal, Inqaba ya Basebenzi (published in exile from 1981) the paper played a crucial […]
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 […]
Initially named “Jabal, Bulletin of the Baluchistan People’s Liberation Front.” Over the course of its circulation, the subtitle intermittently shifted to “The Voice of Balochistan” and “Baluchistan People’s Liberation Front.” Jabal, or Mountain in Balochi, was a cyclostyle pamphlet curated, written, edited, printed, and circulated by members and sympathisers of the Baloch Popular Liberation Front […]
Spearhead. The Pan-African Review was established by the South African lawyer and journalist Frene Ginwala in Dar es Salaam, the capital of Tanganyika (later Tanzania), just one month ahead of the country’s full independence in December of 1961. The newspaper was published monthly until May 1963, when Ginwala was expelled to Great Britain, likely due […]
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 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 […]
‘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 Third World Liberation Front was produced and distributed in the San Francisco Bay Area of North America. The journal itself only produced three issues in 1969 but there were numerous periodical-type documents such as pamphlets and zines created by the movement, the Third World Liberation Front, between 1968 and 1972.
Toward the end of 2015, the South African student and worker movements became both increasingly fragmented by internal political differences, and demobilised by the repressive apparatuses of the state and capital. As a result, a lot of spaces for debating and strategising around free education on campuses disappeared. Additionally, a lot of energy got diverted […]
Digital resources for teaching and learning about revolutionary periodicals.
