Publica[c]tion is a Black student-driven publication – a collective process that includes but also transcends and goes beyond the independently, self-published product. Initiated in conversations at the end of 2015 as an attempt to extend and continue the work of the student movement, the publication was printed and launched in August and September 2017. In this paper we reflect on the collaborative, experimental process of public action in order to highlight our learnings and perspectives on publication and relations of knowledge production more broadly. We consider the generative dialectic of critique and creation and how our creative process emerged partly from critiques of academic production and publication. Academic production we understand as largely subordinated to the neoliberal university’s individualism and its undervaluing and undermining of practices of collective knowledge production. From our critique of capitalist publication’s fixation on the product, we fixated on process – wanting to do something collectively and collaboratively. Publica[c]tion’s process emerged as an attempt to archive the particular mo(ve)ments of intense campus struggle, to connect and think and write together as Black student activists across different campuses, and as a critical response to the mainstream media where student struggles were represented in problematic and limited ways. The paper closes by looking at some of the possibilities that the process opened up – how collective reading constitutes a generative alternative to ‘peer review’, how a refusal of the authoritative power of the editor can liberate the creativity of contributors, and how publication can be used as a process of building community.

The digital version of Publica[c]tion can be downloaded as a PDF here [file size: 11MB].

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, was clandestinely distributed by religious disciples, Maoists and Marxists across small towns, village and chars (sandback islands) in Bangladesh between 1972- 5. The paper was a central plank in the opposition to Sheikh Mujibur and the Awami League government over this period. Editors were sent to jail, issues were confiscated and destroyed and publications often took place under difficult and dangerous conditions.​

Why did the government feel so threatened? The emergence of Bangladesh in December 1971 after a brutal and traumatic nine-month long war was greeted with jubilation. There was a popular feeling amongst many Bangladeshis that they were finally free, and could now undertake the task of decolonisation. In this paper, I will translate some of the rare issues of Haq Katha, Satya Patra and Bishwo Shanti between 1972-5 from Bengali to English, and demonstrate how Haq Katha was critical to the formation of Islamic Socialist consciousness, offering an alternative radical postcolonial future for the nation-state in South Asia and beyond. Newspaper sections titled ‘Murid’s Darbar’ (disciple’s court), ‘Weekly Thoughts’, and ‘Bhashani’s Sayings’ provide rich examples of vernacular socialism and Islamic heterodoxy, where concepts such as land, labour, property, rule, sovereignty, and God were interrogated, reformulated or transformed. Building on ideas of ‘new man’ in Fanon, Che, and Biko, my paper will show how Haq Katha tried to build an ‘Islamic Socialist’ man. This was an identity connected to radical anti-colonial pasts and socialist legacies; subaltern internationalism; progressive Islamic ontologies and Afro-Asian futures. The Islamic Socialist ‘man’ challenged the rise and power of nationalism. Finally, I examine the importance of recovering Islamic Socialist print cultures and legacies in the Global South at a time of global right-wing populism and Islamophobia.