Abstract
Periodicals played a key role in the making of left, anticolonial, and anti-imperial institutions, politics, and cultures in the global south. This issue of Radical History Review investigates how journals operated as a device for the creation and reproduction of counterhegemonic formations, often under conditions of extreme repression and neglect. This article builds on a multiyear project entitled Revolutionary Papers, as well as the contributions to this issue, to lay out the conceptual and political groundwork for examining these periodicals and introduce our collective commitment to mobilize them as part of political struggles today. The article expands the definition of the periodical, the revolutionary, and the global south and argues that these materials offer an alternate method for studying and practicing left anticolonialism. It proposes an analytical approach to periodicals that allows one to unpack the place of the journal in building left, anticolonial institutions, politics, and cultures, and opens up the possibility of mobilizing these journals as pedagogical material in education and movement contexts.
In the early 1970s, an eighteen-year-old poet and writer joined the Communist Party of Pakistan (CPP) and was tasked with a simple but crucial responsibility: to diligently pick up fifteen to twenty copies of the party’s monthly publication and ensure that they were delivered to a regular roster of readers.1 Banned in 1954 as part of a global wave of anticommunism, the CPP had no access to formal printing presses and distribution networks for its newly established organ, surkh parcham (Red Flag). In response, the party set up a bare-bones underground infrastructure. Party members penned surkh parcham, converted this to stencil, covered it with ink, and hand-printed multiple mimeographs. The CPP cadre, including the young poet-writer, would replace formal distribution networks to circumvent policies of censorship. Often constituting the cadre’s first act of disciplined, political work, distribution went hand in hand with reading surkh parcham and sometimes writing and editing the organ. In the case of Ahmad Salim, the young poet-writer, surkh parcham became a defining political and intellectual turning point, inaugurating a multidecade commitment to collectively building progressive politics and culture in Pakistan, a place characterized by imperially funded state repression and institutional neglect.
We begin this special issue on left, anticolonial periodicals of the global south with Ahmad Salim and his politicization through surkh parcham because his life history represents what journals do to people and what people can do with journals. Surkh parcham indexed Ahmad Salim’s lifelong foray into left culture and politics, teaching him discipline through political work, intellectual production, and cultural expression. He became a regular contributor and joined the editorial board. He eventually spent his life contributing to the survival and flourishing of progressive culture and politics in Pakistan. Wearing many hats—including those of a political worker, editor, poet, historian, translator, journalist, researcher, teacher, folklorist, and archivist—Salim authored over 150 writings focusing on a dizzying array of topics, including multiple collections of Punjabi poetry, books on the left and oppressed nations in Pakistani history, and in-depth studies of labor, children, education, and religious minorities.2 He joined forces with many figures and networks, including the Urdu literary giant and communist Faiz Ahmad Faiz3 (whose work he translated into Punjabi), and as a member of other political parties on the left.4 Often, this was done at a cost to his own livelihood and comfort; his love of history, literature, and politics meant he spent much time in poverty and in jail. Journals remained a central motif of his life. In Pakistan, a vibrant culture of periodicals found innovative ways to circumvent censorship, and Salim established, contributed to, or edited many of them.5 In 2001, he established arguably the largest independent archive of progressive materials in Pakistan, the South Asian Research and Resource Center (SARRC), which today houses rare periodicals and other print ephemera central to the reproduction of progressive culture and movements in Pakistan (fig. 1).6 A key collaborator in our multiyear, transnational investigation into left, anticolonial journals of the global south, Salim passed away as we were preparing this issue for Radical History Review. We dedicate this issue to him.
. . . . .
The Revolutionary Papers project has spent the last five years engaging in conversations, collaborations, and coproductions to unpack the role of the periodical in making left, anticolonial, and anti-imperial politics and cultures in the global south. This issue is a culmination of a larger project. As a transnational research and teaching initiative, Revolutionary Papers has included research and input from editors, archivists, and movement organizers like Ahmad Salim, as well as nearly a hundred university-based researchers. This issue of Radical History Review, also entitled “Revolutionary Papers,” is just one arm of a larger set of activities. These include online workshops (2020) and a major international conference (2022) hosted at Community House in Cape Town, a site of historic anti-apartheid struggles and contemporary grassroots movements (figs 2–3).
It includes collaborations with archives of progressive and radical materials, most significantly a yearlong project with Ahmad Salim’s forty-thousand-item collection. Throughout 2023, we coedited a research-based blog series on the archival remnants of African and Black diaspora anticolonial movement materials in a contemporary site of opinion, analysis, and new writing of the African left, Africa Is a Country.7 And over the past five years, we have developed a digital platform at revolutionarypapers.org that hosts a growing repository of digital teaching tools on periodicals from Palestine, Pakistan, Tunisia, South Africa, Cuba, India, and elsewhere.8 Our first two teaching tools were based on journals collected and conserved by Ahmad Salim.9 With this issue, we launch a fresh crop of tools out of Kenya, Palestine, Namibia, Oman, Chile, and the broader Third World, embodied in the famous transnational publication published out of Beirut, Lotus.
In this issue of Radical History Review, we deepen our research and teaching project through a focus on a wide array of periodicals that circulated throughout the global south in the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries. The issue begins with six feature essays in a section entitled “Engaging Revolutionary Periodicals.” This section challenges us to expand our studies of the periodical and left anticolonialism more broadly, as well as what constitutes the geographies of the global south. Through essays from China, Cuba, South Africa, Ka Pae ʻĀina o Hawaiʻi (the Hawaiian archipelago), Ethiopia, and the broader Black Atlantic, each study makes key intellectual and political interventions in our understanding of the revolutionary and the place of the periodical in the past and present. The second half of the issue is dedicated to seven teaching tools, most developed exclusively for this special issue, introduced by an essay on periodicals as political pedagogy by our key collaborator, the literary scholar, political organizer, and artist Sara Kazmi. This section, entitled “Periodicals as Digital Pedagogy: Archival Tools for Political Education,” is coedited by Kazmi and Hana Morgenstern. The issue combines scholarship, education, and organizing in a deliberate effort to mirror an approach we have found central to revolutionary politics, cultures, and papers. We strive to reproduce, in other words, the antipartitionist ethics that formed journals like surkh parcham and people like Ahmad Salim.10
In this essay, we lay the conceptual and political groundwork for the larger project which informs this special issue. We begin by introducing our expansive definition of revolutionary periodicals of the global south. The next section argues that these materials offer an alternate method for studying and practicing left anticolonialism (Toward the Journal as Method). We propose an analytical approach to periodicals that allows us to unpack the place of the journal in building left, anticolonial institutions, politics, and cultures. Finally, we discuss how the essays in this issue have engaged with this approach (Countering Power: Building Left Institutions, Politics, and Cultures), deepening and complicating our understanding of radical periodicals.
Revolutionary Periodicals of the Global South
Like the rest of our project, this issue encompasses periodicals and related movement materials, which includes newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, handbills, and other serialized public communiqués. What holds our terms together is that these materials were published on paper, usually in a serialized format, meaning they include handbills and communiqués that came out more than once, like mimeographs published during the 1989 prodemocracy movement in Tiananmen Square (Li, this issue) or the Palestinian bayanat that circulated regularly during the First Intifada (Hastings, this issue). Occasionally we include movement materials and print that do not fall into the periodical’s precise remit in that they were issued only once, as in the case of US Imperialism in Ethiopia, a pamphlet transcribed by hand in the late 1960s critical to Ethiopian anti-imperial thought (Alemu, this issue).
We understand these periodicals as revolutionary insofar as they emerged with a structural critique of regimes of power and sought in one way or another to uproot those structures and regimes. Their purpose was to revolutionize societies and cultures. The political formations behind these ideas and the visions of revolution pursued exist on a continuum. They include the publications of parties and organizations actively interested in overthrowing existing colonial governments as well as community and civic organizations aimed at mobilizing for alternative social and cultural life. They also include diasporic journals aimed at supporting movements abroad or radical political and cultural projects in the West. And finally, they include cultural journals aimed at revolutionizing art, language, and literary form.
Many of the periodicals under consideration were associated with communist, socialist, or national liberation parties, anticolonial or anti-imperial movements, or related organizations like student or labor unions. Although we limit our study to antiauthoritarian publications, some journals were hierarchical or beholden to specific party lines. A vanguardist structure was, after all, one of the forms taken by left, anticolonial organizations. Other publications fall more broadly into universalist or nonaligned internationalisms and anticolonial projects, including those run by artists, thinkers, and organizers. The plurality of proposals on how to manifest revolutionary politics and culture reflects the rich conversations and disagreements that took place across these journals. Indeed, intense debate took place within and across journals on the content and contours of revolution. For example, political formations marginal to larger national liberation movements would use periodicals as a space to analyze how colonial, imperial, capitalist, patriarchal, casteist, or other hegemonic logics and practices survived even in spaces professing to be revolutionary.
Yet, while an understanding of the revolutionary differed across and even within periodicals, they largely shared what we understand as an antipartitionist approach, or a refusal to segregate politics and economics from culture and the arts. Instead, art, literature, education, protest, critical economic analysis, and political organizing were often seen as interconnected and mutually reinforcing elements necessary for the attainment of consciousness and liberation. This is reflected in news articles, essays, literature, and artworks that were printed on neighboring pages, forming interesting continuums and conversations. Many radicals, like the Palestinian Ghassan Kanafani, Neville Alexander in South Africa, and Ahmad Salim in Pakistan, mirrored this approach by acting simultaneously as editors, critics, organizers, poets, archivists, or scholars. If decolonization requires pulling the existing colonial structure up by the roots and replacing it with liberatory ideas and practices, then this requires work across political, cultural, and social arenas.
We deploy the term global south as an imprecise yet critical outgrowth of the idea or project of the “Third World” so central to the imaginary of many of these publications.11 Framed by anticolonial and postcolonial movements, the Third World highlights the regional visions, solidarities and tricontinentalisms linking the decolonizing countries of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, especially in the first three decades following World War II (fig 4). Most periodicals showcased in our project and in this special issue are associated with this latter period of anticolonial struggle, known as the heyday of decolonization. Global south diaspora and minoritized communities are another major site of radical journals, especially those fighting for decolonization, including Indigenous communities in settler colonial contexts like North America and Australia. Finally, from the postindependence period onward, the global south encompasses the failure of the democratic and socialist ambitions of anticolonial movements in neocolonial states and the continuation of imperial and colonial dynamics, especially through the adoption of capitalist logics and neoliberal policies. This includes extractive and exploitative global capital, military occupation, extreme inequality, majoritarianism, authoritarianism, climate catastrophe, global crises of democracy, and crises of displaced persons and refugees. Within this issue, periodicals associated with this period include those tied to Palestinian liberation during and after the first Intifada, the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, antiauthoritarian struggles in Kenya, the prodemocracy movement in China, Indigenous movements for decolonization in Ka Pae ʻĀina o Hawaiʻi, and popular front politics in Cuba. What becomes clear as we read within and across these journals is that, like the revolutionary, what constitutes anticolonial geographies of liberation shifts depending on context, history, and political orientation. The global south is both material and imagined, connected through similar forms of material subjugation and defined through political discourse and struggle.
Toward the Journal as Method
Periodicals of the global south offer us a new method for critiquing and overturning colonialism and intervening in how anticolonialism is studied and practiced in the twenty-first century. We believe that far too many scholars study these materials while distancing their work from contemporary political questions and movements. As we write, we find the starkest example of this in the tepid responses to the genocidal onslaught by the Israeli state on Palestinians in Gaza by many who have built careers publicly critiquing racism and colonialism. The disconnect between practicing “radical” scholarship and practicing radical politics is indicative of many of the problems outlined below. Against this disconnect, Revolutionary Papers calls on scholars to harness these movement histories in order to reflect and act on the injustices and issues of our times.
Like others who study colonialism and anticolonialism, we seek to foreground the periodical as an important archive. Yet we also take issue with how periodicals and anticolonial archives more generally are approached as repositories from which we lift articles and insights that are then integrated into scholarship. In far too many cases, archival materials are delinked from their radical politics, fetishized and commodified as part of a new interest in anticolonial print and art.12 In contrast, we believe that journals offer us an alternative form for theorizing and practicing anticolonialism. Thus we propose to view the journal as method rather than (merely) as source.
We are not the first to offer a site like the journal as a method. In recent decades, many scholars have proposed the framing of disparate objects and locations—the ocean, the body, Asia, Malaysia, China, intersectionality, or utopia—as frameworks for new methodologies. What these scholars have in common is a concern with “the way one thinks, not what one thinks about.”13 Their purpose is “programmatic and oppositional, in that each study proposes an alternative methodological approach while also critically interrogating an existing set of analytical practices.”14 Our own method centers on the notion that anticolonial journals functioned as revolutionary, counterhegemonic tools of worldmaking. In the midst of repression and ruin, journals fostered provisional counterinstitutions through the labor of political and cultural workers. They became the means for the circulation of counterpolitical ideas that emerged from collective and dynamic conversations between multiple people and movements. And they offered opportunities for experimentation with new countercultural forms necessary for the creation of resistant and liberatory social consciousness (fig. 5).
In contrast to these counterhegemonic methods, the study of anticolonialism and postcolonialism is largely approached through a fixation on the Western episteme, individual thinkers (as opposed to collective labor), established fields and disciplinary (rather than antidisciplinary) orientations, and static canons versus thought in action. From the 1980s onward, postcolonial studies have been especially influenced by these modalities. Though the field is shifting significantly, it has traditionally been dominated by the project of unearthing the imperial and colonial logics that underpin existing disciplines and institutions,15 part of a decades-old preoccupation with displacing “the truth-claims of Eurocentric discourses” and “interven[ing] in and interrupt[ing] the Western discourses on modernity.”16 Though critically important, postcolonial studies focus on the West has paradoxically elided history’s most important critics of colonialism, namely the political, social, and cultural movements that established decolonization and ousted colonial powers. Individuals and institutions that continue to distance themselves from one of the most important, anticolonial struggles of the twenty-first century—the Palestinian national liberation movement—amplify this decontextualized orientation. In more extreme cases, they repress solidarity with the Palestinian struggle.
The problem of method manifests itself equally in academic canonization, which plucks great authors, works, figures, and ideas out of the crowd and elevates them into disciplinary recognition. Scholars have rightfully sought to expand the Eurocentric canon, by focusing on the works of seminal thinkers like Frantz Fanon, W. E. B. Du Bois, Aimé Césaire, Mahatma Gandhi, or Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o.17 Yet canonization has defined postcolonial and decolonial studies around the work of these individuals, who are sometimes referred to as the “big men” of anticolonial history.18 A move to pluralize this field, then, inadvertently falls back on an individuated search for expertise and mastery. Another result of canonical framing is that the field of postcolonial literature and decolonial social and political theory is largely dominated by the oeuvre of individual authors, while histories of cultural and literary movements fall to the margins. This approach not only overlooks but indeed negates the counterhegemonic logics of decolonization, in which ideas and art were not the products of individual genius but of collective social processes. It also elides the centrality of antidisciplinarity in anticolonial movements. The consequence of all of this is, of course, that we read thinkers out of joint with the movements and debates from which they emerged, erasing collective labor and conversations.
In historical studies, critics of people’s history have claimed that accounts “from below” can be uncritical, oversimplified, and romantic approaches to the working classes or that they have imposed a homogenous radical vision onto the “masses.”19 Marxist historiography has come under critique for similar reasons. Yet, inspired by historians challenging power in history writing,20 we argue that a critical reading of both the product and the production of movements and the materials they produced can offer a deep and layered sense of social process necessary for social history. A careful reading of these materials and the power dynamics they were immersed in, in fact, offers us (often inconvenient) complexity about both the history at hand and our approach to engaging it, rather than oversimplified correctives. As Howard Zinn reminds us in the preface to A People’s History of the Third World, “a people’s history does more than add to the catalogue of what we already know.”21
It is our hope that the anticolonial journal can offer some tools for addressing these critiques. For us, the shift in method involves the understanding that periodicals provide a view into the counterhegemonic processes central to decolonization that individual texts cannot. Indeed, it is precisely the provisional and conversational nature of this form that lends the periodical its oppositional capacities.
To begin with, in its plurality of authors and workers, the journal reminds us that anticolonialism is a process that requires a laboring collective. The production, circulation, and reading of anticolonial journals involved a wide range of people who made the journal happen and were transformed in the process. Everything that made it onto its pages was the product of a process, a set of relations, and labor that included editors, writers, translators, printers, distributors, artists, and readers.22 These networks extended to the counterpublics that were influenced and produced by periodicals and in turn influenced and produced a periodical’s publication and editorial decisions. Centering collective work and infrastructure highlights the periodical as a social and reproductive space, which we elaborate on when discussing the notion of the counterinstitutional below. As Merve Fejzula argues, “we must incorporate ‘movement chores’ into intellectual history’s purview.”23 In a powerful essay reconstructing gendered labor in the making of the 1956 Congress of Black Writers and Artists, Fejzula shows how these chores were often feminized, taking place in “reproductive settings like the home and cafés” in ways that reveal the immense, invisible labor that made anticolonial intellection, including literatures and arts, possible.24
Likewise, when we view anticolonial thought through the lens of collective process the journal emerges as a self-theorizing text. The periodical’s many authors and workers theorized power and social change through many media and across time. And yet we often treat these journals as primary sources, producing a division between who does politics and who does theory. By approaching the journal as a method rather than a source, we interrupt the binary between primary and secondary and insist that these journals—and the people that made them—were makers and writers of history and producers of anticolonial theory. To recognize the vibrant counterpolitical concepts that circulated in periodicals as “social theory” requires breaking with an attachment to theory as an object of individual authorship and as a tract of writing that takes place at a distance from political struggle. It requires opening up to ideas circulating quickly, embedded in the heat of struggle.
The notion of collective authorship also has consequences for how anticolonialism is researched and taught. In social and political theory, it means paying less attention to Fanon the individual and more to the movements that surrounded him and the debates in which he was enmeshed. It requires that we turn back toward what David Scott calls the “problem spaces”25 of anticolonialism, a discursive space made up of an “ensemble of questions and answers around which a horizon of identifiable stakes (conceptual as well as ideological-political stakes) hangs.”26 We might look at social rather than individual thought as the place where questions were asked, unsettled, and worked out through processes of dialogue and disagreement.
The journal’s local and time-bound nature also reminds us that these questions were geared toward specific political, historical, and cultural contexts. We are reminded that most anticolonial intellectuals were busy trying to understand how phenomena like race, colonialism, empire, and capital manifested in their locales. These were not universal terms but forces that showed up differently across time and space and intersected with emplaced, precolonial forms of hierarchy (like caste). These questions were often worked through in literature or art that combined local elements such as folklore with transnational anticolonial forms such as surrealism. The worldmaking constituted through thought and imagination were key elements in the countercultures fostered by periodicals in the midst of decolonization.
In offering the journal as a method for doing anticolonialism differently, we are building on other interventions centering anticolonial movements and periodicals in recent years.27 This includes work that highlights the journal as an infrastructure and aesthetic forum necessary for publishing outside the colony and the Western metropole.28 The consequences of these multiple interventions on the way we approach anticolonialism are immense, and each brings attention to certain tacit assumptions embedded in existing approaches. One of the more direct ways that we mirror this method of practicing anticolonialism differently is through our digital teaching tools. These have been designed to address journals as a present-day method to practicing anticolonialism and not just as a source for the past. Just as anticolonial periodicals intended to communicate, educate, agitate, and connect so too does Revolutionary Papers experiment with forms of alternative pedagogy for a wider and deeper engagement with movement materials. In “The Periodical as Political Educator: Anticolonial Print and Digital Humanities in the Classroom and Beyond,” section coeditor Sara Kazmi reflects on this topic in the movements that produced the periodicals and through the Revolutionary Papers teaching tool initiative today. These tools are designed as interactive digital presentations for scholars, students, organizers, and activists to engage and learn directly from and with anticolonial and left periodicals, understanding them in their wider context. At the same time, the digital pages offer alternative history and pedagogical guides for educators and organizers to revisit key questions around history, politics, and culture in the present. Kazmi demonstrates how teaching tools offer an alternative curriculum that can connect anticolonial knowledges with political struggle. As an experiment in anticolonial pedagogy in the present, our digital teaching tools are one attempt to excavate earlier imaginaries of decolonization that can shape present resistance to neoliberal knowledge and potentially inform contemporary political organizing.
Countering Power: Building Left Institutions, Politics, and Cultures
To fully realize the journal as method, periodicals must be approached in an expansive manner. We propose the hermeneutic of the counterinstitutional, the counterpolitical, and the countercultural to facilitate this. What constitutes the counterhegemonic is not static across time and space or even contemporaneous journals in the same site. These journals force us to be sensitive to the plurality of lefts and anticolonialisms imagined in response to power, even as they reveal a surprising consistency in ideas of the revolutionary across the global south. The counterinstitutional helps tease out how periodicals acted as alternatives to colonial and neocolonial institutions, or as vehicles of recovery in the aftermath of destruction, serving as and catalyzing new infrastructures, organizations, and networks. The counterpolitical narrows in on how the periodical facilitated critiques and alternatives, often underground, through the articulation of translated and novel political vocabularies and ideas. The countercultural shows how periodicals fostered local literary and art scenes outside the colonial sphere and the Western metropole, challenging and reconstituting the aesthetic and literary parameters of anticolonial and postcolonial cultural production.
Building Counterinstitutions
Periodicals were one of the tools anticolonial movements used to build new worlds during the ruins and erasure of colonialism, imperialism, and authoritarianism. They functioned as radical alternatives to political or cultural institutions that either did not exist, had been repressed or destroyed, or were only active in the context of an existing colonial or authoritarian apparatus. As low-cost, flexible publishing venues, periodicals circulated easily, nurturing local and regional culture through the publication of new thinkers and the transmission of ideas and information. Many periodicals constituted alternative organizations in themselves, communities of left critique and action. And many played an incubation role for new organizations and movements and local and international networks, scenes, readerships and counterpublics.
For us, then, the counterinstitutional encompasses the social and material histories of periodicals and requires us to approach the journal through a materialist lens, attentive to the concrete practices that made the journal and that the journal helped create. We read for histories of collective, institution and network formation, both those documented in the pages of the journal (such as weekly or monthly reports from intellectual or political clubs or reports on conferences in different parts of the world) and the social histories of production, circulation, and sparks journals nurtured. We consider the journal as an archive of cultural infrastructure and movement-building history and a catalyst and tool of organizational formation. Here we unpack and appreciate how counterinstitutional practices were constituted through the writing, production, distribution, and reading of these papers. Specifically, we highlight anticolonial publication practices as collective endeavors, vehicles for transnational and transtemporal alliance building, organizing, education, and mobilizing tools, and as catalysts and platforms of new publics producing political, literary, and cultural scenes.
First, the making of periodicals was a social and relational process, binding many people together in the formation of new organizations, work sites, networks, and tendencies. These were curated spaces that connected political organizers, writers, editors, translators, distributors, artists, readers, printers, and more in the work of putting editions together. If we look at the backstage work, the tables of contents, ads, announcements, and attributions, the people that came together in the process of producing and disseminating these papers, and the conversations and links created by them, we can map the evolution of broader cultural and political collectives and movements that constituted the conditions of possibility for the journals.
The range of democratic practice within editorial collectives varies widely. For instance, in a teaching tool prepared for the larger Revolutionary Papers project, Sam Longford shows how Dawn, the official organ of Umkhonto weSizwe (MK), the armed wing of the African National Congress (ANC), functioned as a device to discipline the cadre.29 Yet a significant number of anticolonial left periodicals were intended as collaborative spaces to think, imagine, and strategize. As Katerina Gonzalez Seligmann notes, the creation of the cultural magazine Tropiques by Suzanne and Aimé Césaire and their friends in Martinique in the 1940s emerged from what they articulated as the need for a “bureau de pensée” (thought office) and a “centre de réflexion” (center for reflection).30 In parallel, Koni Benson, Asher Gamedze, and Nashilongweshipwe Mushaandja, in a digital teaching tool prepared for this special issue, highlight that the Namibian Review was governed by a constitution that envisioned a collective, anti-imperialist, anticolonial, and antiracist “platform” to “serve as the instrument and conscience of national unity,” a space for “political dialogue,” and for the “broadest possible united front against foreign domination.”31
Second, periodicals helped forge cross-border and transtemporal relationships in and through the production and circulation of materials, as they constituted political communities and formed links that countered the limits of existing colonial spatial impositions and historical imaginations. As transnational bridges and key tools of alliance building, these publications were key to forging local and internationalist solidarity. Deemed scaffolds, mouthpieces, or organs, these vehicles of communication and connection enabled alternative networks and social formations beyond the localized and international divide and rule at the heart of coloniality.
The broader project of socialist internationalism abounds with examples of movement-related solidarity publications that reimagined and built anti-imperial, anticolonial, and antiracist networks as Afro-Asian, Pan-African, Pan-Arab, or African diaspora. This was the mission of the Tricontinental, founded in 1967 by the Organization of Solidarity of the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America (OSPAAAL) following the first Tricontinental conference. This well-known periodical, published in Havana, covered topics from national liberation movements to the capitalist exploitation of natural resources, imperial policies, and international solidarity between leftist political movements across Africa, Asia, and Latin America. For instance, the literary and cultural journal Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings, published in Arabic, English, and French from 1968 to 1991, was established by the Afro-Asian Writers Association in 1958 with the goal of supporting solidarity of the nonaligned movement at its seminal Bandung conference in 1955. In a teaching tool prepared for this special issue, Sara Marzagora and Rafeef Ziadah present Lotus as part of infrastructures of solidarity forged between different movements, connecting networks of writers, authors, and exhibits to create, theorize, and build relations across anticolonial struggles.32
Beyond the coverage of anticolonial movements elsewhere, many papers held space when particular politics could not take organized political form, enabling transnational alliances and connections of places across time. Tony Wood shows us this in his essay “Fighting Fascism on Empire’s Doorstep: Mediodía and Popular Front Politics in 1930s Cuba.” According to Wood, the 1930s left Cuban magazine Mediodía saw itself as a “cause of Cuban democracy and of a new national independence.” It thus took a Popular Front strategy in its editorial approach to build public consensus against fascism at a time when most communist parties were illegal and had to operate clandestinely. A “Popular Front culture” in Cuba, argues Wood, “developed predominantly through the articulation of a leftist internationalism.” Limited press freedom meant that urgent questions about imperialism, sovereignty, racial inequality, and social justice could not be debated openly. By highlighting the systemic nature of the common enemies in reportage on events in Nanjing or Barcelona, in the Spanish Civil War, or in Chinese resistance to Japanese occupation, Mediodía enabled the development of antifascist counterpolitics. These 1930s collective writings and juxtapositions of local and international struggles were important precursors for building alternative links and imaginations, which Wood argues laid the groundwork for the surge of internationalism two decades later in the Cuban Revolution. A similar new mapping of milestones in the revolutionary history of Kenya emerges in the teaching tool of the Ukombozi Library by Njoki Wamai, Wairimu Gathimba, and Kimani Waweru, prepared for this issue. Here, dissident journals uncover an alternative history of regimes and resistances that challenge conventional disconnections between the colonial and postcolonial periods.
Third, the periodical can be understood as an organizer, mobilizer, and political educator. This is brought into sharp focus in Noor Nieftagodien’s essay for this issue, “Congress Militant: Revolutionary Paper as Political Organizer.” In his study of Inqaba ya Basebenzi and Congress Militant (1981–90), the journal and paper of the Marxist Workers’ Tendency of the ANC, Nieftagodien argues that these papers functioned as socialist tools of political organizing aimed at transforming the ANC into a mass anti-apartheid organization of the working class. He notes that the Tendency’s ideas about the role of its paper was derived from Lenin’s explanation of the purposes of Iskra, the official organ of the Russian Democratic Labour Party (1900–1905): a “newspaper is not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator, it is also a collective organizer.” A paper “may be compared to the scaffolding erected around a building under construction; it marks the contours of the structure and facilitates communication between the builders, permitting them to distribute the work and to view the common results achieved by their organized labor.”33 As a historian who was a youth activist in the 1980s with groups that joined the Tendency, Nieftagodien shows how “the entire cycle of producing the paper—from writing to editing and dissemination—was integrally woven into the structure and the activities of the organization.”
Fourth, some serialized materials became an outlet for widespread public opinion, organizing and self-fashioning, establishing what Promise Li describes as a kind of public square. In his essay for this issue, “From Mimeographs to Self-organization: Beijing Workers’ Writings in the 1989 Tiananmen Movement,” Li studies the creation and circulation of daily handbills by the Workers’ Autonomous Federation (WAF) in Beijing as an example of how democratic political spaces can be forged through periodicals. Li argues that these writings—small leaflets containing workers’ writings, public letters, calls for direct action, manifestos, and poetry circulated and posted on Beijing walls daily throughout April to June 1989—represent efforts to create “an inchoate civil society” under authoritarian conditions, “stimulating everyday citizens’ capacity for political self-activity.” The handbills developed into agitational leaflets with clear demands, and in form and content they served as a public square, a space created by WAF outside the bounds of the Chinese state. Li tracks this development “from mimeographs to self-organization,” which is but one manifestation of the kinds of sparks revolutionary papers intended to ignite. After all, iskra means “spark” in many Slavic languages and became a common name for many movement self-publications, including Cheche Magazine (Spark in Kiswahili), the radical, socialist student magazine at the University of Dar es Salaam, which was banned in the late 1960s.34
We are introduced to another serial form that opened new vistas of public space in Thayer Hastings’s teaching tool prepared for this issue on the bayanat, or communiqués, posted on walls to organize, shape, and sustain public participation during the First Intifada, the Palestinian popular uprising against repressive Israeli military rule (1987 to the early 1990s). The communiqués were a locus through which protests, general strikes, and other community gatherings were coordinated, as well as a forum for news and political critique about the military occupation and the resistance. Hastings argues that a public was defined and animated through circulating, concealing, reading, and implementing calls to action articulated in the bayanat. Through its function as a flexible notice board, the bayanat enabled a reclaiming of public and political space from the occupation, in turn reflecting and strengthening the self-conception of Palestinian civil society as a counterinstitutional move.
Articulating Counterpolitics
As we can see in the example of WAF’s handbills and the Palestinian bayanat, the importance of periodicals lay not only in their unique organizational capacities but also in specific resources they offered in relation to the development of public discourses and ideas. Expanding who had access to the “means of publication” on a regular, affordable basis, newspapers, handbills, and/or magazines were platforms for anticolonial, antiauthoritarian intellection and discourse. These scenes were precarious. The publications often operated without the patronage of state and elites, under violent colonial and authoritarian conditions, and in politically urgent times. The primary aim of their ideas was not “only to interpret the world” but to “change it.”35 As a result, counterpolitical concepts had specific foci and took on distinct shapes on the pages of periodicals. Ideas had to circulate in a way that allowed them to escape capture and destruction by empire, states, elites, and majorities, while simultaneously fueling the collective formation of oppositional political consciousness that could be mobilized against power. It was critical, then, to locate print forms that did not require support from established publishing houses, media outfits, or academic institutions, as well as print that was low cost and papers easy to carry and smuggle.36
The print form of the anticolonial periodical as a collection of genres—whether they be news journalism, essays, letters to the editor, records of debates, or short stories—more easily mirrors the pace of political events than any monograph could. With multiple and dialogic authorships and reports on conferences and events, periodicals reflected social debate and the development of ideas as accumulated through multiple perspectives, opinions, and responses, developing and shifting across time. Indeed, to recognize the vibrant counterpolitical concepts that circulated in periodicals as “social theory” requires a break with an attachment to theory as an object of individual authorship, as writing that takes place at a distance from political struggle.37 It requires an opening up to ideas circulating quickly, embedded in the heat of struggle.
Reading across periodicals in such a manner can reveal how many became forums for the development of unique conceptual vocabularies on a collective scale. In this regard, the subject and method of revolutionary politics constitute one area of focus. A second, recurrent focus in radical papers dealt with conceptualizing the spatial and temporal scale of revolutionary politics in various sites across the global south. A number of periodicals thus became forums for new vocabularies meant to facilitate links between universalist visions of socialist, anticolonial worlds and the contingencies of particular struggles. Should a movement to radically overturn an existing colonial order come from the factory floor or the rural hinterlands, through the worker or the landless peasant, for instance? Should they wait for capitalism’s internal contradictions to manifest themselves in a crisis, or force this crisis to come about immediately through armed uprising? Though these debates are in one way quite canonical in major Marxist writings, periodicals offer us insight into a plurality of attempts to expand and apply the scale of revolution across various contexts in the decolonizing world. For instance, in a teaching tool for this issue, Marral Shamshiri shows how Sawt-al-Thawra (Voice of the Revolution)—a weekly bulletin published by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Oman and the Arabian Gulf (PFLOAG)—placed the Dhofar Revolution within the global constellation of revolutionary Third World, leftist, and anticolonial networks including the Palestinian and Iranian Left, national liberation movements from Cuba to Vietnam, global women’s liberation, and the New Left.
Three kinds of vocabularies recur in journals that attempted to do this work of connection. First, within and across radical papers, writers translated or transliterated global revolutionary vocabularies across languages. Terms like capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, feminism, feudalism, socialism, and communism—all terms of European provenance—were worked out in disparate southern contexts in many languages. This working out included not merely a linguistic translation but a political one. Periodicals operated as paper platforms where radicals could critically reflect on a particular term’s ability to tie local conditions to broader structures of power while simultaneously retaining an explanatory force that unmasked the specific operations of power on southern ground.
For instance, Amsale Alemu traces how a plurality of Ethiopian radical prints—specifically “journals, stand-alone pamphlets, and reprinted issues created and distributed among organizations based in Addis Ababa, North America, and Europe”—occasioned an intergenerational and geographically dispersed working through of how US imperialism materializes in an Ethiopian context. In “Clandestine Issues: Tracing US Imperialism across Ethiopian Revolutionary Papers,” Alemu argues that this “was a necessary step to clarify and link the Ethiopian revolutionary struggle to anticolonialism” around the world. Alemu argues that Ethiopian revolutionary thought, which during the 1974 Ethiopian Revolution avowed Marxist-Leninism, “required an anticolonial argument, precisely to make the case for the world-historical problematic of what they alleged was Ethiopian feudo-capitalism.” Alemu goes on to show how a plurality of prints helped generate the “problem space of this anticolonial argument.” The very materiality of the papers reviewed is what made possible the mobilization of US imperialism as a key analytic in Ethiopian revolutionary politics, prior to the 1974 revolution. It is precisely because it was printed inside and outside Ethiopia that the analysis of US imperialism could eventually be deepened.
Second, periodicals became the means through which individuals and movements mobilized terms from non-European linguistic worlds, turning these terms themselves into forums and tools for occasioning revolutionary connections. Sometimes, non-European terms have traveled to become part of a global revolutionary lexicon. We see this today; as we witness the largest global protests in solidarity with Palestine in history, Intifada in slogans like “There is only one solution! Intifada, revolution!” has emerged out of a particular anticolonial and Arab-speaking context to signify universalist resistance against settler colonialism, apartheid, racism, and imperialism everywhere. This is alongside its widespread invocation as a term for uprising, rebellion, and the “shaking off” of all sorts of oppressive structures across the Arab-speaking world. At other times, non-European terms have been mobilized to ensure that local imaginaries are plugged into global revolutionary politics.
For instance, in an essay entitled “‘Ka Aina No Ka Poe o Hawaii’: Kokua Hawaii’s Huli Newspaper, 1971–73” for this special issue, Aaron Katzeman and Drew Kahuʻāina Broderick study Huli, a semiregular newspaper issued by the grassroots political organization Kōkua Hawaiʻi. They show how huli, both the concept and the periodical, was mobilized to encourage a commitment to “shared struggle across racial, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds in opposition to intensifying capital investment and US military entrenchment in Ka Pae ʻĀina o Hawaiʻi, the Hawaiian archipelago, following US ‘statehood.’” Huli, which denotes a “desire to ‘overturn,’ or ‘the need to transform the current political and economic system to construct a new order, not merely soften up the existing one,’” according to the “prominent Hawaiian sovereignty leader, anti-imperialist activist, poet, and political science scholar Haunani-Kay Trask,” is mobilized in this periodical as a conceptual medium to connect the nascent Hawaiian sovereignty movement to the anticolonial, liberatory politics of the Third World in the 1970s. Katzeman and Broderick challenge in particular a nativist, identitarian, and exclusionary idea of what constitutes the histories of Hawaiʻi’s sovereignty movement, showing instead that the desire to transform was deeply interlinked with class struggle across racial and ethnic lines.
Finally, figures and places travel through periodicals to signify particular imperial and colonial conditions as well as possible imaginations for shapes that resistance could take. So we see recurrent invocations of Patrice Lumumba, Ho Chi Minh, Che Guevara, Mao Zedong, Vietnam, Ethiopia, South Africa, and Palestine as shorthand for imperial violence and anti-imperial resistance (fig. 6). A portrait of Ho Chi Minh, for instance, adorns the cover of the Mazdoor Kissan Party Circular, an organ of Pakistan’s Workers and Peasants Party, as the party invokes transnational peasant movements. In their teaching tool on APSI magazine, included in this issue, Pablo Álvarez and Francisco Rodriguez show how journalists invoked dictatorships in Argentina and Brazil to indirectly talk about Pinochet in Chile, and used the 1987 First Palestinian Intifada to speak surreptitiously about conditions of protest and repression in Chile. Similarly, Corinne Sandwith, who presented on the newspaper of the Communist Party of South Africa at the 2022 Revolutionary Papers conference in Cape Town, analyzed how “Ethiopia” became a trope in political cartoons published by the paper, providing a kind of visual pedagogy in counterpolitical modes of debate and participation. She stressed the affective labor performed by the newspaper through these visual depictions, alongside its detailed documentation of atrocity and its practice of “truth-telling against the lies of the state,” sharing contrasting representations of Mussolini and Zulu warriors to illustrate her point. Time and time again, periodicals invoked revolutionary figures, places, and events as symbolic shorthand for shared repressions and visions for liberation politics. It would require another project to unpack, for instance, the work that any one of these invoked; for instance an entire book could be written just on the shared and divergent meanings of Ho Chi Minh and Vietnam across southern radical papers.
Practicing Countercultures
Periodicals fostered local literary and art scenes as alternatives to the colonial sphere and the Western metropole, challenging and reconstituting the aesthetic and literary parameters of anticolonial and postcolonial cultural production. The framework of countercultural formation highlights how journals provided a forum for new anticolonial aesthetics, art practices, and print forms. It reflects on how the latter took shape through circulations between local, regional, and international channels and how they contributed to literacy and political education.
While the journal could certainly not replace the vast institutional resources of states or empires, in many colonial contexts it offered valuable tools for the reconstitution of culture. In his essay on national culture, Fanon provides us with evidence of the immense obstacles involved in the creation of culture during and after colonization.38 Where can the artist identify art materials and practices in the rubble of languages, traditions, philosophies, and denigration of entire worlds? What is the literary subject of an African writer who has been schooled in English and French and exclusively within the Western canon? Just a few years later, similar questions were raised by the Palestinian writer and organizer Ghassan Kanafani. Among other things, he asks how colonized Palestinian writers and writing might develop in light of the colonial destruction of urban centers, where readings and gatherings, cafés, literary presses, bookshops, intellectual and literary clubs, and cultural organizations would otherwise form the core of a country’s productive cultural scene.39 As Katerina Gonzales-Seligmann notes, literary development requires a publishing industry, gathering places, organizations, literary journals, and a wide array of “institutions that provide literary training [or mentorship], facilitate and promote the circulation of literary texts, and consecrate literary value, including commercial, non-commercial and academic or state-supported cultural projects.”40 These reflections speak to the broader question of how to form an anticolonial cultural and “literary infrastructure,” in light of erasure.41
In Palestine and across the global south, periodicals came in to address this gap. Indeed, the importance of the press in establishing Palestinian counterpublics and national culture both before and after the Nakba has been established irrefutably.42 Refqa Abu-Remaileh and Ibrahim Mahfouz Abdou argue that the literature that established modern Palestinian identity before 1948 can in itself be understood as a literature of periodicals (adab maqalat) as opposed to one of books, and the same could likely be argued for some post–1948 scenes.43 As Hana Morgenstern and Maha Nassar both discuss, the Palestinian newspaper al-Ittihad and the journal al-Jadid launched a literary and cultural movement that played an outsized role in the revival of the literary scene and the formation of an anticolonial Palestinian cultural and political movement.44 Through short stories, poetry, and new aesthetic experiments, al-Jadid imagined solidarity between Palestinians and anti-Zionist Jews; documented the lives of Palestinians living under Israeli military occupation and their experiences of the Palestinian Nakba; produced political critique while evading the political censors; promoted education, literacy, and a left public imaginary; and mobilized Palestinian national gatherings around illegal poetry festivals.45 Fanon’s queries in On National Literature also speak to a deeper question about anticolonial worldmaking: namely, how to imagine a new world in the midst of the old, to dismantle the master’s house when one has only ever known the master’s tools. Here, too, the journal was key as a forum in which to debate aesthetics and forms and experiment with them. This included writing literature in service of social, political, and psychic processes of decolonization. These processes include the integration of precolonial models into contemporary forms, the rehearsal of liberated relations in stories or songs, the creation of new regional imaginaries, or the social realist documentation of colonial histories and anticolonial struggles. African and Caribbean journals such as Tropiques were instrumental in framing, arguing for, and giving a forum for experimentation with Negritude, surrealism, and other anticolonial styles.46 They revived precolonial African cultural elements for contemporary imaginaries and broke Western aesthetics and binaries toward an anticolonial poetics. The North African journal Souffles-Anfas became a venue for multilingual regional writing.47
It is clear that the journal’s dialogic form, combining literature, art, and aesthetic theory and circulating conversations across regions and countries, was critical to the fertilizations that made all this possible. Seligmann, for example, uses the idea of “location writing” to show how magazines actively imagined new pan-Caribbean identities across space and time.48 Likewise, in a teaching tool on Savera magazine for this issue, Areej Akhtar, Javaria Ahmad, and Sana Farrukh Khan discuss the articulation and literary practice of “critical realism” as part of the work of the India Progressive Writers’ Association. As Akhtar, Ahmad and Khan note, critical realism indexed “self-reflexive literature that compelled its readers to look ‘inward’ at natal institutions of class, gender, language, ethnicity, and religion that contributed to social inequalities rather than simply looking ‘outward’ at colonial wrongdoings.” This form was closely linked to international trends including socialist and social realisms, as well as the project of Arab commitment literature found in journals such as al-Jadid (Palestine), al-Tariq (Lebanon), and al-Adab (Lebanon) in the Arab world.49
Indeed, culture broadly conceived may have played the greatest role in the elusive yet vital aim of (re)shaping consciousness pursued equally across communist and anticolonial movements. This was a milieu in which the writer was venerated as “the engineer of the human soul.” Spanning poetry, art, critique, and learning, the journal was uniquely situated to address multiple aspects of consciousness such as awareness, relationality, identity, imagination, and analysis. Yet as Mae A. Miller-Likhethe suggests in this issue, the consciousness of the audience and the readership is largely absent from the scholarly record. In “Black Internationalism, Print Culture, and Political Education in Claude McKay’s Banjo,” Miller-Likhethe asks us to interrogate “the history of the audience” and the process of consciousness formation inherent in readership, which are largely “missing” from our conception of Black radical and anticolonial traditions. The article posits modes of diasporic readership through Claude McKay’s semi-autobiographical novel Banjo (1929). By reading the character’s engagement with Black periodicals such as Negro World and La Race Nègre, Miller-Likhethe opens a speculative door into the consciousness-shaping power of periodicals, giving form to anticolonial imaginaries past and future. She reminds us that we cannot assume to know the full effects of these periodicals in the shaping of political consciousness. More crucially, Miller-Likhethe offers us an innovative methodological route into charting how these periodicals were received and how they created awareness in the broader political battle against racism and colonialism. She opens the door, in other words, for another phase in our Revolutionary Papers project: the study of how periodicals shaped our imaginations of a world after empire.
Conclusion
We began this essay with Ahmad Salim and wish to end it with his story. Salim was buried in Lahore at the end of 2023, his funeral attended by poets, writers, and political workers similarly committed to the protection and reproduction of progressive politics and culture in Pakistan. In the months that have followed, memorial events have been held across the world, remembering the work of an old comrade and writer-poet, radicalized as a young man and committed throughout his life to the making of a more just and capacious world through the production and protection of the word, written, spoken, and performed. At Revolutionary Papers, we will honor his memory by continuing to work with his collection and the people in whose trust he has left it, foremost Dr. Humaira Ashfaq, a scholar of progressive Urdu literature. Neither all the papers Salim conserved nor all the periodicals that we have come across in our broader work reflect liberatory and egalitarian ideas of anticolonial worlds (the revolutionary pursuing vanguardist—even hierarchical visions of the world—persists even in these journals). They nevertheless offer us profound insights into thousands of political and cultural experimentations pursued by cultural and political workers around the world faced with the overwhelming violence of colonialism, racism, empire, capitalism, patriarchy, and authoritarianism.
In this essay, we have pointed to the journal as an alternative method to studying and doing anticolonialism. The journal, we have argued, forces us to consider anticolonialism as a process always in formation and conversation rather than a finished product, the result of collective labor rather than individuated thought, and antidisciplinary in its antisegregationist approach to the creation of knowledges and the arts rather than committed to the reproduction of siloed disciplines. This is not to say that the journal did not have its limitations. For instance, it assumed that people could read and write, itself a sign of privilege. Though there are several examples of how journals circulated even among those who were technically illiterate (Nieftagodien tells stories of how political workers preparing the Congress Militant transcribed stories from those who could not write and read them back to those who could not read; in work elsewhere, Kazmi reflects on how writings in the Mazdoor Kissan Party circular traveled as performances through street theater) the form of the periodical is nevertheless as exclusive as it is inclusive, potentially productive of other kinds of hierarchies.50 Nevertheless, the journal has the potential to stretch how we think about lefts and anticolonialisms in the past, present, and future. It also has the potential to challenge how we enact anticolonial thought and politics today. As part of this essay and this issue of RHR, we show how we at Revolutionary Papers have experimented with reproducing the ethos of the journal through the creation of digital teaching tools aimed at mobilizing these periodicals as interventions into how we think about the past and the present.
By laying out the hermeneutic of the counterinstitutional, the counterpolitical, and the countercultural, we have offered an approach to the journal that treats it not merely as a source from which to cull information but as a product of broader movements and productive of bigger collectives. Through the lens of the counterinstitutional, we have argued that it is possible to map how the periodical’s flexible and circulatory power made possible the creation of alternative institutions and infrastructures to those of the (nation) state, often in the aftermath of colonial and imperial destruction. Through the optic of the counterpolitical, we show how one can draw out noncanonical concepts that seek to critique and provide alternatives to colonialism, capitalism, and authoritarian power. And finally, through the prism of the countercultural, we have shown that journals provided fertile grounds for the experimentation in new aesthetic and political forms of cultural expression often necessary for the creation of political consciousness that could counter colonialism and other forms of violent power.
This article is an offering for others who wish to engage the staggering archive of southern socialisms and anticolonialisms that we have collectively inherited. We hope that it can be the beginning of a conversation that critically honors the legacies—however checkered at times—left behind by Ahmad Salim and the many others who have tried to create a world free of colonialism.
There are no primary authors. This paper is the result of a collaborative research and writing process between all three authors, listed here alphabetically.
Notes
Some examples of his publications include his books Jab aankh se na tapka: Saif Khalid (When It Did Not Drip from the Eyes: Saif Khalid), Bhagat Singh, Bhutto aur Kashmir (Bhagat Singh, Bhutto and Kashmir); Pakistan ke siyaasi qatl (The Political Assassinations of Pakistan), Meri dharti, mere log (My Land, My People), Jeeve Punjab tehrik kidhar nun? (Whither ‘Long Live Punjab’ Movement?), and Tooti, banti assamblian (Dissolution of Assemblies in Pakistan). He is the author of multiple books of Punjabi poetry and literature, starting from his first compilation of Punjabi poetry, Noor munarey, in 1966. Examples of his translations include Raat ki baat, a translation into Punjabi of Faiz Ahmad Faiz’s Urdu poetry; Jo Bijal Nain Aakhia, a Punjabi translation of Sheikh Ayaz’s poems; and Eik udaas kitab, a translation of Amrita Pritam’s compilations on the poets and writers of the world who laid down their lives in the struggle for democracy.
They first worked together at Abdul Haroon College and later at the National Council of Arts Folklore Research Centre. Salim, Meri dharti, mere log.
He was an active member of the National Awami Party, which combined the urban left with marginalized nations on the peripheries of Pakistani power.
For more on how the cultural sphere remained a key site for the reproduction of left politics, see Toor, State of Islam; and Ali, Surkh Salam.
He cofounded SARRC with two friends, Leanord D’Souza and Nosheen D’Souza, but remained the only initial founder involved throughout the establishment and running of SARRC.
There are thirteen articles published as part of this special series on Revolutionary Papers in Africa is a Country special series. For the introductory article, see Ahmad, Benson, and Morgenstern, “The Media of the Useable Past.”
Revolutionary Papers, “Teaching Tools,” https://revolutionarypapers.org/teaching-tool/.
These were a banned pamphlet called Jabal and the organ of the Mazdoor Kissan Party or Workers and Peasants Party, both out of counterhegemonic and left movements in 1970s Pakistan.
Salim’s antipartitionist ethics was most strikingly on display through his Punjabi literary pursuits. Along with other radical scholars, poets, and writers of Punjab, partitioned in 1947, Salim pursued antipartitionist literary collaborations across the India-Pakistan border.
Like other broad geographical terms, global south is an imprecise indicator for vast territories and populations. We recognize the multiple global Norths in the global South and vice versa. We also use it to signify the areas and peoples active in resisting colonialism and imperialism.
A good example of this is the large-scale buying up of Arab modernist art, much of it anticolonial, by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, an institution which has also come under harsh criticism by a collective called the International Imagination of Anti-National Anti-Imperialist Feelings (IIAAF) which is committed to radical politics and art in the present. See Strike MoMA Working Group of IIAAF, “Strike MoMA: A Reader.”
Bhambra and Holmwood, Colonialism and Modern Social Theory; Connell, “Decolonizing Sociology”; Go, Postcolonial Thought and Social Theory; Shilliam, Decolonizing Politics; Marwah et. al., “Empire and Its Afterlives”; Pitts, “Political Theory of Empire and Imperialism.”
Getachew and Mantena, “Anticolonialism and the Decolonization of Political Theory”; Shilliam “Decolonizing Politics”; Alatas and Sinha, “Sociological Theory Beyond the Canon”; Onwuzuruigbo, “Indigenising Eurocentric Sociology”; Patel, “The ISA Handbook of Diverse Sociological Traditions”; Morris, “The Scholar Denied.”
This selection tends to get further narrowed to works that are translated and available in European languages.
Minkley and Rousseau, “‘This Narrow Language’”; Rousseau, “‘Unpalatable Truths’”; Lissoni, “From Protest to Challenge,” 149–151; Hyslop, “E. P. Thompson in South Africa”; Magubane, “Whose Memory—Whose History?”; Rassool, “Rethinking Documentary History.”
Choudry and Vally, History’s Schools;,Durrani, Never Be Silent; Depelchin, Silences in African History; Prashad, The Darker Nations; Hillebrecht, “Hendrik Witbooi and Samuel Maharero”; Kelley, Freedom Dreams; Trouillot, Silencing the Past; Lissoni, Nieftagodien, and Ally, “‘Life after Thirty;’” Namhila, “Archives of Anti-Colonial Resistance.”
We also think it is necessary to forge these relations with archivists and the archival collections that often hold these periodicals. We have no space to unpack this argument here but have written about it elsewhere. See Benson, “Feminist Activist Archives”; and Ahmad, “On Political Friendship and Archival Labour.”
Fejzula, “Gendered Labour,” 423. In fact, recent interventions by Fejzula and Sohrabi offer a route to bringing into visibility essential re/productive labour that is erased when anticolonialism is primarily categorized as an instance of individually authored intellection. See Fejzula, “Gendered Labour”; and Sohrabi, “Writing Revolution as If Women Mattered.” See also Armstrong, Bury the Corpse of Colonialism; and Boyce Davies, Left of Marx.
See for example a number of recent works that center anticolonial movements and/or theoretical and cultural frameworks, including Gulick, Literature, Law, and Rhetorical Performance in the Anticolonial Atlantic; Rhodes, “Power to the People: The Black Panther and the Pre-Digital Age of Radical Media;”,Salem, Anticolonial Afterlives in Egypt; Tinson, Liberator Magazine and Black Activism in the 1960s; Gopal, Insurgent Empire; Gandhi, Affective Communities; Di-Capua, No Exit.
Almohsen, “Arab Critical Culture and Its (Palestinian) Discontents;”,Bulson, Little Magazine, World Form; Gamedze and Naidoo, “The Mustfall Mo(ve)ments and Publica[c]tion;”,Halim, “Afro-Asian Third-Worldism into Global South;”,Harrison, Transcolonial Maghreb; Hirji, Cheche; Kendall, Literature, Journalism, and the Avant-Garde; Morgenstern, “Beating Hearts”; Nassar, Brothers Apart; Seligmann, Writing the Caribbean in Magazine Time; Steiber, “The Haitian Literary Magazine;” Tinson, Liberator Magazine and Black Activism in the 1960s.
This attachment to finding anticolonial authors reflects an attachment to anticolonial authority and mastery. Such an attachment works to erase the multiple collectives, dialogic processes, and (re)productive labor necessary for anticolonial intellection, which was never the product of an individualized and atomized mind. See Singh, Unthinking Mastery; Elam, World Literature; and Fejzula, “Gendered Labour.”
Kanafani, Adab Al-Muqawama Fi Falastin al-Muhtala [Literature of Resistance in Occupied Palestine].
See for example, Kabha, “The Arabic Palestinian Press between the Two World Wars.”
Morgenstern, “An Archive of Literary Reconstruction after the Palestinian Nakba”; Nassar, “The Marginal as Central.”
For instance, in a contribution at our Revolutionary Papers 2022 conference, Ciraj Rassool argued that periodicals like Anti-CAD Bulletin and Torch published by the Non-European Unity Movement in South Africa reproduced the hierarchies of the school. Rassool, “Schooling the Nation through Words.”
