An edited book project of short essays, interviews, and longer chapters, we focus on papers of the African left, featuring movement journals, widening our appreciation for the range of self-publication that came out of oppositional movements across the continent across time, and opening up the question of the role of archiving in movement building and movement histories.

These publications were organising tools which not only circulated ideas and fostered networks of resistance but also acted as archives of emancipatory struggle- spaces where political vocabularies, networks of solidarity, political analysis, cultural movements, and artistic practices were forged in conversation and conflict. They contain histories of these movements, their activists, struggles, political debates and analyses. Further work is needed to gather, study and activate these activist archives, which document the continent’s past and ongoing anticolonial struggles, revolutionary visions, and experiments in freedom, thereby reshaping how we understand Africa’s intellectual and political histories.

This Revolutionary Papers/Africa is Country special series guest edited by Mahvish Ahmad, Koni Benson, and Hana Morgenstern. This year long series will feature posts from a wide range of authors working with the archival remnants of African and black diaspora anti-colonial movement materials. The series aims to show how papers from the Pan-African left from across the continent and wider diaspora can reinvigorate a politics and pedagogy that run counter to the current cooptation of anti-systemic histories. These papers from the midst of anti-colonial revolt remind us of the messy, rich alternatives imagined by those in the heat of struggle.

A special issue on magazines and newspapers of decolonization, anti-Apartheid and related left movements in the 20th and 21st centuries. Organized by the Revolutionary Papers collective and network.

This issue will examine periodicals and other print ephemera—including newspapers, cultural and literary journals, magazines, and pamphlets—as sites of Left, anti-imperial, and anti-colonial critical production across the Global South. During struggles against colonialism, Apartheid, and postcolonial violence, revolutionary papers generated oppositional networks, critical politics, left mobilizations, literary scenes, and alternative artistic practices. Often produced in exile, forced underground, or excluded from traditional sites of intellectual production such as the university, they served as conduits and catalysts of collective critique and literature, discussion, and political or cultural self-definition. Political and cultural dissenters relied on the periodical’s flexibility, circulatory power, and capacity to foster intellectual and literary scenes to fashion new fields of thought. Editors and contributors developed analyses, critiques, and alternative visions through records of debates, clubs and gatherings, essays, letters to the editor, translations, news, local and international literature, photography, and visual art.  With left periodicals as their communicative tools, they developed unique political vocabularies that addressed local concerns while linking them to global revolutionary praxis.

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