Revolutionary Papers is a transnational research collaboration exploring 20th century periodicals of Left, anti-imperial and anti-colonial critical production. Read More
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 […]
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 […]
My paper seeks to draw out how writers in the journal positioned literary writing within their anti-colonial anti-fascist commitments. Description of periodical Mensagem. Printed 1948–1964 in Lisbon (and circulated across Portugal and in Angola and Mozambique). Published in Portuguese and appeared intermittently. Produced by students at the Casa Dos Estudantes do Império – literally, the […]
Given the importance of literature to various forms of social cohesion, it is not surprising that the European and U.S. empires that have dominated the geopolitical existence of the insular Caribbean have not readily invested in literary infrastructure throughout the archipelago. The impact of empire on infrastructure for the production of Caribbean literatures remains underexamined […]
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 […]
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 […]
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] […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
“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 […]
⬤ CALL FOR PROPOSALS! (January 2026)
The Revolutionary Papers Project in conversation with Pluto Press seeks contributions for an edited book collection entitled: African Revolutionary Papers: Politics and Practices of Activist Archiving.
⬤ Manasheer of the First Palestinian Intifada: Bayan no.1 (UNLI)
The document below is a scanned image of a Palestinian bayan (sing.), a communique or leaflet, from the first Intifada. It was distributed on 8 January 1988, in the first days of the popular and mass uprising throughout Palestine. To understand the context that this document emerged from, we encourage you to explore the history […]
⬤ Mazdoor Kissan Party Circular
This teaching tool provides insight into the cultural politics of the Mazdoor Kissan Party (MKP) in Punjab, Pakistan. A brief introduction to the party’s formation, trajectory, historical context, and key intellectuals like, Ali Arshad Mir, Ishaque Muhammad and Sibtul Hassan Zaigham will be provided. However, the focus is on the party’s synthesis of regional histories […]
⬤ Regimes and Resistance: Kenyan Resistance History Through Underground and Alternative Publications
PALIAct Ukombozi, a Library of Revolutionary Histories. When Kenya attained its independence in 1963 from the British occupation, parliament passed an act to enable the creation of the Kenya National Library Service (KNLS). KNLS was established and mandated, among other functions, to provide library service to the public. However, the attainment of self-rule did not […]
⬤ Teaching Lotus
This teaching tool discusses the relevance of the journal Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings, a trilingual (Arabic, English, French) quarterly published by the Afro-Asian Writers Association from 1968 to 1991, for the development of critical and anticolonial pedagogies. Lotus embodied a project of intellectual, political, and aesthetic internationalism, which promoted solidarity as an editorial praxis, debated it theoretically, and textualized it as genre and form. Therefore, Lotus offers students and educators a vast archive to analyse the relationship between anticolonial scholarship, anticolonial creativity, and anticolonial militancy in the Global South.
Digital resources for teaching and learning about revolutionary periodicals.
