Revolutionary Papers is a transnational research collaboration exploring 20th century periodicals of Left, anti-imperial and anti-colonial critical production. Read More
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 […]
Lail-o-Nihar | لیل و نہار, started in 1957 as a newspaper distributed weekly in Pakistan by Progressive Papers Limited publishing house … read more
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 […]
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 […]
New Youth was the magazine of the Transvaal Indian Youth Congress, based in Johannesburg. It forms part of the broader print ecosystem of the Congress movement in the 1950s. Most of the articles in the magazine appear under pseudonyms like Spartacus, Johnny Youngman, and Leftie, though the names of TIYC members like Moosa ‘Mosie’ Moolla […]
‘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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
The Young Democrat was a small magazine produced in Johannesburg around 1956 by “a group of girls and boys, ages ranging from 10-14 years” who “disagree with the Government and believe that Peace, Freedom and Equality should reign”. This homespun and informal little political magazine was ‘roneoed’ (stencil duplicated), part typewritten, part handwritten, and hand-illustrated. […]
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 […]
Digital resources for teaching and learning about revolutionary periodicals.
