Revolutionary Papers is a transnational research collaboration exploring 20th century periodicals of Left, anti-imperial and anti-colonial critical production. Read More
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Mazdoor Kissan Party Circular; later circulated as Proletari The Mussalli Speaks: caste, regional identity and language in the poetry of the Mazdoor Kissan Party This paper closely examines the party organ of the Mazdoor Kissan (Workers and Peasants) Party (MKP) in Pakistan, with a particular emphasis on the party’s polemical engagements with Left-wing debates around […]
The Radical Underground: The Secret Circulation of Propaganda and the Rise of Global Anti-Imperial Consciousness 1919-1936 Between 1914 and 1945, the India Office maintained a growing list of “proscribed publications” featuring any literature deemed seditionist, dissident or provocative against the British Empire. The historical record suggests that hundreds of titles and thousands of physical copies […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
Sawt al-Thawra (Voice of the Revolution) was a weekly bulletin published by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Oman and the Arabian Gulf (PFLOAG), or Jabha al-Shaʻbīya li-Taḥrīr ʻUmān wa-al-Khalīj al-ʻArabī in Arabic, from 1972. The PFLOAG was a Marxist-Leninist organisation engaged in armed revolutionary struggle in Dhufar, Oman, against a counterinsurgency commanded 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 […]
“No to Coca-Cola!”: Socialist Periodical Yön in Turkey (1961-1967) This paper analyses the socialist magazine Yön published in Turkey between 1961 and 1967. The foundational influence of Yön, which was published weekly for six years, was to shatter the taboos that smothered the words Marxism and socialism and gain visibility for them. Yön and its […]
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 […]
Digital resources for teaching and learning about revolutionary periodicals.
