Revolutionary Papers is a transnational research collaboration exploring 20th century periodicals of Left, anti-imperial and anti-colonial critical production. Read More
Morning Watch: Prabhatam and Socialist dreams in Malayalam in the 1930s The Malayalam journal Prabhatham was launched in 1935 with the emergence of a Congress Socialist cell within the nationalist party in Kerala. From its inception it was subjected to censorship and surveillance by the colonial government as the newspaper began to create a universe of reporting […]
I have titled this set Continental staffriders, liberation bonfires and dance borrowing from South Africa’s infamous literary magazine and cultural organization, Staffriders Magazine published between 1978 – 1993. I will be sharing poems, short stories, interviews, and music that speaks to this Magazine’s epic cultural and political aesthetics. The aim is to pay homage to […]
Historical connections in the Global South: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Cuban Anti-racist struggle for Democracy This paper reconstructs the connections between Du Bois and Cuban intellectuals within global south struggles for anti-racist democracies. The first section shows how Du Bois connections with Cuba occurred both at the level of intellectual collectives and through interpersonal […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
A Literary and Rhetorical Analysis of Selected Anti-Apartheid Discourses: Plan’s The Combatant, SWAPO’s Pre-independence Revolutionary Magazine The Combat, 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 in […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 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 […]
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 […]
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Izwi Labantwana, Die Kinderstem, Voice of the Children is the official newsletter of the southern African organisation the Children’s Movement, which had been produced between 1986 and 2017. The newsletter released issues annually in the early 90s, increasing up to five issues per annum in the later years. The production team largely consisted of child […]
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 Dhofar, Oman, against a counterinsurgency commanded by […]
What can a textual artifact such as a journal’s table of contents tell us about a particular literary culture? Quite a lot, it turns out, when one begins to excavate the political and cultural networks and practices of a period that are revealed therein. In this tool we will take a closer look at a […]