Revolutionary Papers held its second online workshop on December 14, 2020, on the theme of the “Counter-political,” which focused on intellectual histories of dissident periodicals. Following on from the first workshop on the theme of the “Counter-cultural,” which spotlighted the infrastructures and contexts that shaped radical publishing, the second workshop dove into the non-canonical conceptual vocabularies that inform the political critique contained in these journals. Themes and connections that surfaced addressed questions of translation, commensurability, and internationalism in the Global South. Lead questions for the readings were:

1. What forms do concepts take in periodicals produced in the heat of political struggle?
2. How did concepts travel through periodicals? How did they change as they circulated?
3. What are the ethics of resurrecting concepts developed at a particular time and place, for a particular political purpose?
4. What role can concepts in periodicals play in current attempts to decolonise social theory?

Each participant presented a single ‘concept’, which could be interpreted as a term, a literary trope, or a metaphor that had emerged from the periodical that they will be presenting at the main conference in the future. Two sets of readings, on generating concepts from the Global South, and on concepts in periodicals and movements, were also pre-circulated for discussion:

On Concepts:

• Dilip Menon. Changing Theory: Thinking Concepts from the Global South.
• Huey Copeland & Krista Thompson. Afrotropes: A User’s Guide.
• Mahvish Ahmed. Movements as Sites of Thought.

Periodicals and Concepts:

• Angelique Stastny. Anti-colonialism and Black Power: Indigenous Periodicals in the Pacific.
• Layli Uddin. Revolution: Malcolm X and Maulana Bhashani; and Daghi.
• Sara Kazmi. The Hamlets Hum in Punjabi. Tanqeed.

Mahvish Ahmed opened the discussion with an overview of the readings in light of the larger intellectual and political questions that Revolutionary Papers seeks to explore. She noted how the Decolonise movement within academia has stressed a critique of canonical social theory, resurrecting anti-colonial thought through individual thinkers. However, movements continue to be seen merely as the backdrop against which ‘theory’ was enacted – for example, the Algerian Revolution figures only peripherally in the contemporary return to Frantz Fanon. Mahvish emphasized an engagement with the marginalised forms of intellectual labour contained within revolutionary periodicals to centre “movement thought”, to pluralise canons of social thinking and move beyond the “digestible, logocentric forms preferred by the university” towards collective modes of theorising. She touched on the tension between the “hard particularity” of local concepts embedded in particular contexts, and their reworking and translation by political struggles across the globe, referring in particular to Dilip Menon’s notion of “archipelagic thinking” to bring together different concepts and magazines of the Global South in the twentieth century.

The concepts introduced by each participant opened up the discussion to the tensions and convergences between regional cultures of resistance and internationalist solidarities. For instance, Angelique presented the term “Kanaka”, a concept espousing pan-indigeneity within the Kanaki independence movement in the Pacific Islands, which drew inspiration from Negritude and Black Power. Commenting on these global confluences, Dilip Menon pointed out an important asymmetry, noting how Kanak’s affinity with Blank Panther ideology made it more accessible to global scholars, while indigenous thought rooted in native languages remained relatively unexplored. Similarly, Chana Morgenstern observed how scholars tended to privilege the global imaginary of political blackness over indigenous conceptual worlds, identifying how “we understand much less about the other side of how Kanak culture is structured and why it finds Black Power imaginaries useful.” While acknowledging the limits of “complete commensurability,” Layli Uddin nevertheless reminded everyone that “revolutions demand words to be commensurable, to move across borders.”

Thus, the relationship between local concepts and global imaginaries unavoidably contains such productive tensions, as terms brought forth by other participants also revealed. For example, Sara Kazmi spoke about the concept of “lok boli” or “People’s language” in Marxist Punjabi magazines in 1970s Pakistan, which referenced connections with African liberation movements even as it pushed a local critique of oppressions of caste and class within Punjabi society. Similarly, Idris Jebari spoke about the language politics of a Tunisian Leftist journal, Al Amil Al Tunsi, that moved from French to Arabic, but also critiqued the use of classical/ standard Arabic, writing in Tunisian Arabic instead. This oppositional approach to language also presented itself in concept of “terrorist literature” shared by Hoda El Shakry, which refers to the ability of Maghrebi or Black African literature of French expression to “shatter the original logic of the French language” and resist dominant notions of “cultural synthesis.”

Questions around Marxist-Leninist aesthetics, national literatures, and world literatures also emerged, tying together concepts brought by other participants, which included the idea of the “guerrilla” in Estefania Bournot’s research on a 1970s newspaper founded by Brazilian refugees in Algeria, and “turmas councils” as an experiment in participatory democracy that came up in Koni Benson’s study of The Namibian Review. Other concepts from periodicals shared during the workshop included:

1. “Haq/ হক/ حق”, which roughly translates as “truth,” appearing in the 1970s Bangladeshi publication of the same name. (Layli Uddin)
2. “Freedom,” in the 1920s South African journal, The Workers Herald. (David Johnson)
3. “Ethiopia” as a revolutionary trope in South African anti-colonial newspapers. (Corinne Sandwith)
4. “News” and “expert” in the South African newspaper Abantu-Batho (The People) between 1912 and 1931. (Sisanda Nkoala)
5. “Fascism” in the 1940s Haitian journal, La Ruche. (Jackqueline Frost)
6. “World Literature” in the 1955 Chinese journal titled Translation. (Lifang Zhang)
7. سياسة التجهيل, which roughly translates as “the politics of dumbing-down” in Palestian journals Al-Jadid and Al-Ittihad between the 1950s and ‘60s. (Chana Morgenstern)
8. “Kefah/ کفاح”, meaning “struggle”, in the Tunisian Leftist magazine Al-amil Al-tunsi between 1963 and 1974. (Idris Jebari)

Mahvish announced that Revolutionary Papers will be collecting concepts from all participants to build a glossary that will be featured on the website.