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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