Revolutionary Papers is a transnational research collaboration exploring 20th century periodicals of Left, anti-imperial and anti-colonial critical production. Read More
The Revolutionary Papers Teaching Tools highlight methods of research to bring out relevant insights about periodicals and the politics and pedagogies they were steeped in at the time and since then. They are designed for both educational and organising settings and can be used to focus on certain features of research into the periodical. Learn more.
If you would like to develop a teaching tool based on a revolutionary periodical, get in touch.
A series of digital teaching tools designed with scholars, educators and organizers for the Radical History Review special issue: Revolutionary Papers: Anticolonial Periodicals from the Global South. The tools focus on a range of revolutionary periodicals and related ephemera, from the Cairo-based Afro-Asian literary magazine Lotus, the Palestinian Bayanat of the first Intifada, to the underground pamphlets from the Mau Mau movement in Kenya. They are designed to help students from all walks of life discover the grassroots, dynamic and anti-colonial histories of periodicals, revealing the buried hearts of many cultural and political movements. The tools are made to be accessible, interactive resources that provide archival, literary, and historical insights on magazines and associated print cultures and are conceived as pedagogical aids for the classroom and for political education across a range of community settings.
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 […]
APSI, or Agencia Publicitaria de Servicios Informativos, was an overground magazine that circulated subversive critiques of the Pinochet regime. In this teaching tool, we show how APSI used this ‘permission to circulate’ to unmask Chilean military authoritarianism in broad daylight. Through coverage of internationalist issues, including Third Worldist movements and authoritarianism elsewhere, APSI cultivated an anti-dictatorial narrative […]
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.
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 […]
“Radical changes are taking place in Indian society…We believe that the new literature of India must deal with the basic problems of our existence to-day– the problems of hunger and poverty, social backwardness, and political subjection. All that drags us down to passivity, inaction and un-reason we reject as reactionary. All that arouses in us […]
The Namibian Review: Origins The Namibian Review: A Journal of Contemporary South West African Affairs was published between 1976-1987. Initially it was produced by the Namibian Review Group (later known as the Swedish Namibian Association) and 14 editions were printed by Namibian political exiles in Sweden between 1976-1978. In 1979 the journal was translocated from […]
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 […]
The Revolutionary Papers Teaching Tools highlight methods of research to bring out relevant insights about periodicals and the politics and pedagogies they were steeped in at the time and since then. They are designed for both educational and organising settings and can be used to focus on certain features of research into the periodical.
This teaching tool introduces and explores two newspapers called Dinbandhu (brother of the oppressed) and Dinmitra (friend of the oppressed). Dinbandhu was first published in 1877 and Dinmitra was published later in 1910 in Western India. The teaching tool primarily focuses on Dinmitra which straddled both colonial and post-colonial periods as it continued to get […]
The Revolutionary Papers Conference was held at Community House in Cape Town between April 28-30, 2022. The conference looked at how periodicals—including newspapers, magazines, cultural journals, and newsletters—played a key role in establishing new counter publics, social and cultural movements, institutions, political vocabularies, and art practices. Bringing together scholars, activists, and artists, the workshop traced […]
Between 1935 and 1938, the monthly newspaper Adelante functioned as an expression of the anti-racist struggle in Cuba, denouncing the persistence of racial inequality and racism. Adelante debated the problem of Afro-Cubans, and, in the same phase, economic reparation was demanded in response to the political participation of black people in the Cuban nation. This […]
The Namibian Review: Origins The Namibian Review: A Journal of Contemporary South West African Affairs was published between 1976-1987. Initially it was produced by the Namibian Review Group (later known as the Swedish Namibian Association) and 14 editions were printed by Namibian political exiles in Sweden between 1976-1978. In 1979 the journal was translocated from […]
The Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union of Africa (ICU) and its charismatic leader, Clements Kadalie, dominated the Southern African political landscape of the 1920s. At its peak in 1927, the ICU had 100-1500,000, eclipsing by some distance the African National Congress (ANC) and the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA). The ICU’s message of international […]
This teaching tool focuses on Dawn, the official organ of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), or ‘Spear of the Nation’, which was the military wing of the African National Congress (ANC) and the South African Communist Party (SACP). Founded after the banning of organisations associated with the Congress Alliance and the ‘turn to armed struggle’ in […]
Izwi Labantwana, Die Kinderstem, Voice of the Children is the official newsletter of the southern African 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 in the later years. The production team largely consisted of child […]
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 […]
The Early South African Black Press texts are a category of newspapers and magazines published between 1836 – 1960 aimed at Black, Coloured and Indian South Africans. Because this category of publications was designated retrospectively by scholars who have sought to understand these texts, the designation of which publications fall in this group can seem […]
The Perspectives Tunisiennes movement was intimately linked to youth throughout its history. Founded in 1963 by Tunisian university students in Paris, it presented itself in opposition to the gerontocratic regime of the Parti Destourien Socialiste of Habib Bourguiba. In turn, it espoused the concerns of the country’s youth, which came to represent an open future […]
What can a textual artifact such as a journal’s table of contents tell us about a particular literary culture? Quite a lot, it turns out, when one begins to excavate the political and cultural networks and practices of a period that are revealed therein. In this tool we will take a closer look at a […]
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 […]
Between 1973 and 1977, the Balochistan People’s Liberation Front or BPLF (earlier the Parari) launched an insurgency against the central Pakistani government. They were protesting the dismissal of a democratically-elected provincial government in the country’s southern, marginalised province of Balochistan; subsequent arrests and conspiracy trials of socialist, Baloch political leaders and workers; and a military […]
Revolutionary Papers Classroom is a teaching and research collaboration between Revolutionary Papers and the program in Comparative Literature and Culture Studies at LUMS University in Lahore, Pakistan.
Led by Sara Kazmi, the collaboration approached anticolonial and left periodicals as interventions into and resources for teaching and learning about revolutionary politics in the Global South. The Revolutionary Papers Classroom deepens RP’s commitment to developing pedagogy, methodology and research embedded in Global South contexts. The initiative aims to engage and train young Global South scholars in the comparative and transnational study of revolutionary print through syllabi, reading resources and new research. The Classroom convened a semester-long research seminar incorporating guest lectures from Koni Benson and Mahvish Ahmad, digital humanities training sessions, and visits to local archives at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, LUMS.
The following tools were co-authored by students who enrolled in the project’s taught course titled “Print Cultures of the Global South”. The tools showcase progressive and left-wing publications from Pakistan, including the iconic 1940s literary magazine Savera [Dawn] associated with the anticolonial Progressive Writers’ Movement, and the 1970s periodical Lail-o-Nihar [Night and Day] edited by iconic Pakistani communist and Lotus editor, Faiz Ahmad Faiz.
To bring Revolutionary Papers Classroom to your city or university, write to us at revolutionarypapers@gmail.com.
Al-Fatah (“The Victory” in Arabic) was a weekly Urdu-language socialist periodical published out of Karachi, Pakistan, from May 1970 till approximately July 1990. It published a wide variety of content, although there was a distinct proclivity towards political topics. Al-Fatah‘s socialist leanings informed many stances that it took during its run. It was decidedly pro-China […]
Tulu was a Soviet state-sponsored publication in Pakistan that was in print from 1967-1991, and stopped production after the fall of the Soviet Union. Headquartered in the Soviet Union, it had Russian and Pakistani co-editors who wrote in Urdu, and later in English as well. The magazine was a part of the cultural war between […]
“Radical changes are taking place in Indian society…We believe that the new literature of India must deal with the basic problems of our existence to-day– the problems of hunger and poverty, social backwardness, and political subjection. All that drags us down to passivity, inaction and un-reason we reject as reactionary. All that arouses in us […]
In 1957, Mian Iftikharuddin’s publishing house, Progressive Papers Limited, began to produce a weekly magazine called Lail-o-Nihar. One of the magazine’s first editors was the renowned writer Syed Sibte Hassan while author Faiz Ahmed Faiz was its Chief Editor. Both individuals and the founder belonged to the left-wing intellectual group in Pakistan, commonly known as […]