Revolutionary Papers is a transnational research collaboration exploring 20th century periodicals of Left, anti-imperial and anti-colonial critical production. Read More
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
A Literary and Rhetorical Analysis of Selected Anti-Apartheid Discourses: Plan’s The Combatant, SWAPO’s Pre-independence Revolutionary Magazine The Combatant, was the official voice of the People’s Liberation Army of Namibia (PLAN), the military wing of South West Africa People’s Organisation (SWAPO). As a communication organ that served to disseminate information, educating PLAN fighters, motivating those that were […]
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 […]
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, […]
Lower caste assertion in Modern India has been a topic of critical interest for several researchers in the recent past. The Satyashodhak movement spearheaded by Jotirao Phule in 1873 is one such important movement. However, the movement has largely been studied in a teleological manner, from its birth as a social movement to its culmination […]
Science and Solidarity: The Vigyan Karmee and the Quest for an ‘Afro- Asian Science’ The Association of Scientific Workers of India (ASWI) was formally founded in 1947, the same year when India gained Independence from colonial rule. The ASWI, as a trade union organization of scientists was part of global network of individual scientists and trade union […]
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 […]
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) […]
Vinyl Set: Projecting and Shaping Black Futures Through Sound & Album Art Since the late 1930’s, when Columbia Records art director Alex Steinweiss invented the concept of album covers and cover art, it has become a driving force in shaping popular culture, counter-culture and collective imagination. Before the popularization of television and the advent of […]
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] […]
Digital resources for teaching and learning about revolutionary periodicals.
