Revolutionary Papers is a transnational research collaboration exploring 20th century periodicals of Left, anti-imperial and anti-colonial critical production. Read More
The Blufo newspaper was printed by the African Party for the Independence of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, and played an important role in the struggle for decolonisation and political re-africanisation. Its production was overseen by Luís Cabral, from the Cassacá Congress onwards. The Blufo archive contains all 22 editions produced by the Escola-Piloto in Guinéa […]
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 […]
Reading Ethiopia in Radical South African Newspapers In this paper, I make a claim for Ethiopia as hidden or overlooked revolutionary trope in South African politics and letters and trace its inscription across selected examples of popular South African newspapers. In South Africa, the idea of Ethiopia has been an important site of pan-Africanist and […]
The Negro World was a newspaper published in Harlem, New York between 1918 and 1933. It was the paper of UNIA, the Universal Negro Improvement Association, founded by Marcus Garvey in 1914.
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 […]
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 […]
The Kenya Land and Freedom Army (KLFA) or Mau Mau as it is more widely known as across the world was the cornerstone of the anti-colonial movement in Kenya and presented perhaps the most revolutionary fight against imperialism in the country. After Kenya’s independence from the British in 1963, there were hardly any substantial changes […]
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 […]
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] […]
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 […]
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 […]
⬤ 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.
