Revolutionary Papers is a transnational research collaboration exploring 20th century periodicals of Left, anti-imperial and anti-colonial critical production. Read More
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 […]
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 […]
Communiques were central to the coordination of the mass popular uprising that challenged Israeli rule over Palestinians from 1987 until the early 1990s. These short political texts were called manasheer or bayanat al-Intifada, in Arabic. The Teaching Tool, Manasheer of the First Palestinian Intifada, profiles one such bayan, the first of the serialized bayanat distributed by […]
A Tale of Two Journals: The Poetics and Politics of Community in Mid-Century North India. Urdu literary culture underwent successive aesthetic and political revolutions in the brief period from 1935 to 1970. These revolutions, for social realism and modernism respectively, were ushered in by the journals Shāhrāh (1949-1960) and Shabkhūn (1966-2005). Entirely opposed in their […]
The Young Democrat was a small magazine produced in Johannesburg around 1956 by “a group of girls and boys, ages ranging from 10-14 years” who “disagree with the Government and believe that Peace, Freedom and Equality should reign”. This homespun and informal little political magazine was ‘roneoed’ (stencil duplicated), part typewritten, part handwritten, and hand-illustrated. […]
This paper focuses on the poetry produced by the women of Umkhonto WeSizwe (MK), the armed military wing of the African National Congress (ANC) in the pages of its magazine, Dawn, These poems serve as an archive of women’s individual and collective thinking about their role in the liberation struggle. As a monthly MK journal […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Digital resources for teaching and learning about revolutionary periodicals.
