Revolutionary Papers

Revolutionary Papers is a transnational research collaboration exploring 20th century periodicals of Leftanti-imperial and anti-colonial critical production. Read More

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The journal Third World Liberation Front was produced and distributed in the San Francisco Bay Area of North America. The journal itself only produced three issues in 1969 but there were numerous periodical-type documents such as pamphlets and zines created by the movement, the Third World Liberation Front, between 1968 and 1972.

The journal Al-Fatah (“The Victory” in Arabic) published in Karachi, Pakistan from May 1970 till approximately July 1990. The periodical was produced in Urdu in the two decades it was distributed and became a major supporter of Pakistan People’s Party (PPP). The journal Al-fatah was largely socialist in terms of political inclination and critical of […]

Inqaba ya basebenzi was the journal of the Marxist Workers’ Tendency of the African National Congress, a Marxist group which operated within the larger body of the ANC. The publication Inqaba ya basebenzi was launched in 1981, with the Tendency’s accompanying paper, Congress Militant, launching towards the end of the same decade. The two periodicals […]

In 1989 in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) the prints distributed amongst the local population symbolises a significant occurrence of mass organising in the region’s history. Produced in the form of handbills, waybills, posters and public communiques, prints handed out in factories, universities and on the walls of the streets. While the varying bodies […]

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 […]

Pambana and Cheche were pamphlets and newspapers of the party organ of the December Twelve Movement (DTM) launched in May 1982. DTM emerged from an underground Marxist-Leninist worker’s political party established after the first conference of the Kenyan Marxists-Leninists in Nairobi on December 22-23 in 1974. Later in May 1982 the DTM launched the Pambana […]

Published in Havana between 1936 and 1939, the magazine Mediodía (Midday) brought together Communists, socialists, and other progressives in the common battle against fascism, imperialism, and racism. In its editorial approach, it modeled the Communist International’s “Popular Front” strategy, adopted in 1935, of forging anti-fascist alliances beyond the ranks of the Communist movement itself. The […]

APSI (Agencia de Prensa y Servicios Informativos) was a news magazine focused on international issues. Its origins can be traced back to 1976, during the Chilean dictatorship. The magazine circulated in the Spanish language in Santiago de Chile, and as its success grew, it expanded to other cities. It was not until 1982 that it […]

Lotus was the trilingual (Arabic, English, and French) journal published by the Afro-Asian Writers Association from 1968 to 1991. Initially headquartered in Cairo, but with the French and English editions printed out of East Germany, the journal relocated to Beirut in 1973 following Anwar Sadat’s peace treaty with Israel and the consequent Arab boycott of […]

From 1971 to 1973, the nascent grassroots political organization known as Kokua Hawaii independently published and distributed Huli, a semiregular newspaper featuring radical economic analysis, community news, organizing strategies, political education, social documentary photography, and illustrated agitprop graphics. Kokua Hawaii, based on Oʻahu and active across the Hawaiian islands, was influenced by legacies of militant […]

The Analyst was a magazine published in Jos, Nigeria from 1986 till the early 1990s. While a hand-full of scholarly journals attempting to understand Nigerian and African realities from a Marxist perspective sprung up mainly on university campuses through the 1970s, The Analyst distinguished itself by pursing a highly accessible mass circulation magazine format, seeking […]

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 […]

This little known political periodical, published in Cairo between 1958 and 1961, was largely the initiative of its founder and editor John Kalekezi, or Kale. An activist in his twenties from the Kisoro district of western Uganda, Kale was responsible for most of the dense articles and lively opinion pieces on African anti-colonial struggles that […]

Published first in December 1969, Black Land News formed the propaganda arm for the Black Land Movement (BLM) and its youth wing the Young Pioneers of New Africa (YPNA). Through their newspaper, published initially on a monthly basis and later shifting to biweekly, BLM sought to foster the rise of an independent Black nation from […]

Spearhead. The Pan-African Review was established by the South African lawyer and journalist Frene Ginwala in Dar es Salaam, the capital of Tanganyika (later Tanzania), just one month ahead of the country’s full independence in December of 1961. The newspaper was published monthly until May 1963, when Ginwala was expelled to Great Britain, likely due […]

Born two years after the landmark Culture and Resistance Conference, held in Gabarone, in 1982, Vakalisa Art Associates, a flexible group of about twenty artists, formed to reject the idea of the romantic artist and individual genius, opting to produce work with a purpose— art, in its broadest acceptation, that would develop society and contribute […]

French, African, and Arab: Negotiating Post-Colonial Algerian Identity in Révolution Africaine Six months after Algeria won its independence, an unusual group of militants gathered in Algiers. Led by a Siamese-born French lawyer, Jacques Vergès, the group consisted of French and Algerian journalists, cartoonists, photographers, and militants. Their mission? To craft a new cultural and political […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

1960

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 […]

The Journal of Black Theology in South Africa and its Contribution to the Struggle for Liberation The Journal of Black Theology in South Africa was a bi-annual academic journal which ran from May 1987 until November 1998. In a context of legislated (at least initially) anti-black racism and repression, it sought to be “a vehicle […]

1987

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 […]

1948

A Children’s Movement for Change: Izwi Labantwana/Die Kinderstem/ Voice of the Children Izwi Labantwana, Die Kinderstem, Voice of the Children is the official newsletter of the national 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 […]

1986

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 […]

1972

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 […]

1976

Militant Imprints: Palestine, Art and Revolution in al-Hadaf (1969–72)​ Founded in Beirut in 1969, the Arabic periodical al-Hadaf (The Target) was the media organ of the newly formed Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). The PLFP arose as a guerrilla organization in 1967, espousing a Marxist-Leninist framework and advancing armed revolutionary struggle for the liberation of Palestine. […]

1970
Anti-CAD Bulletin and Torch

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) […]

1940

Counter Political: Networks of (miss)information: fighting against ‘general understanding’ The publications produced from exile during the period of the military dictatorships in Latin America show an advanced awareness of the ideological and political barriers produced by the distortion or invisibilization of certain facts by the media, co-opted by the dictatorial and neo-imperial powers. The FBI (Front […]

1969

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 […]

1940

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 […]

1968

Congress Militant: The paper as a revolutionary organiser Congress Militant, paper of the Marxist Workers’ Tendency (MWT) of the ANC, was published between the late 1980s and 1996 (when it was replaced by Socialist Alternative). As the more propagandistic accompaniment to the theoretic journal, Inqaba ya Basebenzi (published in exile from 1981) the paper played a crucial […]

1980

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] […]

1950

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 […]

1970

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 […]

2000

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 […]

1950
Mensagem

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 […]

1948

The Early Indigenous South African Black Press: A model for decoloniality and multilingualism in journalism education This study examines how the Early South African Black Press can be used to apply notions of decoloniality and multilinguals to the teaching of journalism and society in the South African context.  The study will be exploratory, and will […]

1912

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 […]

1. Souffles-Anfas The Moroccan cultural journal Souffles-Anfas [breaths] ran between 1966 and 1971, when it was banned by the Moroccan government and its founder Abdellatif Laâbi was arrested, imprisoned, and tortured for sedition. The journal was published quarterly (with some double-issues) and ran 22 issues over its brief history. Modestly priced at 3 Moroccan Dirhams, […]

1930

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 […]

1972

La Ruche, Surrealist Antifascism and the 1946 Haitian Revolution La Ruche, ‘Organe de la jeune génération,’ Journal Hebdomadaire Littéraire et Social, began in late 1945 as a cultural, literary and political revue produced by left-militant youth would go on to become some of Haiti’s most important intellectual and political actors. Members of La Ruche, such […]

1945

“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 […]

1960

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 […]

1930

The Messenger, The Crusader and The Radical Black Imagination in the Early 20th Century This paper considers two periodicals published by black radical activists in the United States during the “New Negro” era of the early 20th century. Amid the outbreak of World War I, the Russian Revolution, and the stirring of anti-colonial movements in […]

1917

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 […]

1935

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 […]

1920

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 […]

2000

A Literary and Rhetorical Analysis of Selected Anti-Apartheid Discourses: Plan’s The Combatant, SWAPO’s Pre-independence Revolutionary Magazine ​The Combatant, 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 […]

1980

“We reject the commercial and commodified form of cinema, just as we reject the societal order that produces such a cinema. Neither this form, nor this order, enables humanity to realise itself.” A year prior to Solanas and Getino’s “Towards A Third Cinema” (1969), a group of radical Turkish filmmakers and writers declared this in their new […]

1970

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 […]

1970

This paper focuses on the poetry produced by the women of Umkhonto WeSizwe (MK), the armed military wing of the African National Congress (ANC) in the pages of its magazine, Dawn, These poems serve as an archive of women’s individual and collective thinking about their role in the liberation struggle. As a monthly MK journal […]

1960

In the wake of uMkhonto we Sizwe’s (MK) ‘Mkatashinga Mutiny’ in Angola (1983-1984) and the Congress Alliance’s Kabwe Conference (1985), the ANC’s Department of Political Education (DPE), expressed a need to provide sustained and substantive political education for MK cadres based in Angola. According to the DPE, the reasons for the mutiny – three separate […]

1980

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 […]

1970

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 […]

1970

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, […]

1970

Anticolonial Cultural Reconstruction: Periodicals in the Aftermath of Colonial Violence My talk will look at the literary and cultural journal as a vehicle in the (re)construction of culture, literature and popular education in the aftermath of colonial destruction. I will focus on the 1950-60’s anticolonial activities of two Palestinian periodicals, al-Jadid and al-Ittihad, while offering frames and queries […]

1950

Leftist publications centred around political struggles and groups from the twentieth century had specific aims, and clear ideas of the audience and readership, largely due to the constraints on distribution at the time. This definition of audience and readership was at the centre of most anti-colonial and anti-imperialist publications. For them, publishing was an avenue […]

1970

‘Overthrow the capitalist system of Government and usher in a co-operative Commonwealth one’: the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union of Africa (ICU), the Workers’ Herald, and dreams of revolution, 1923-1929. Abstract: The Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union of Africa (ICU) and its charismatic leader Clements Kadalie dominated the Southern African political landscape of the 1920s. […]

1920

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 […]

1930