Across 104 issues, Mediodía published a dazzling constellation of authors, including Cubans such as the anthropologist Fernando Ortiz, the lawyer and feminist activist Ofelia Domínguez Navarro, the novelist Alejo Carpentier, and the Afro-Cuban poet Regino Pedroso. They also included Latin American, US, and European writers of radical sympathies, from Langston Hughes to César Vallejo, and from André Malraux to Isaak Babel. It was initially a literary monthly before becoming a weekly magazine with a strong political and current affairs focus. Within months it had a circulation of 10,000 copies, its readership spread across the island. Mediodía was centrally concerned with Cuban domestic politics, and with the struggles for democratic representation and for racial and gender equality. But amid the ferment of the 1930s, these battles could not be disconnected from the broader turbulence afflicting the world. The magazine’s coverage reflected this sense of global interconnection: reportage on the Spanish Civil War nestled alongside essays on racial discrimination in Cuba; accounts of Chinese resistance to Japanese occupation featured next to warnings of the looming threat Nazi Germany posed to Czechoslovakia.

Mediodía provides a compelling window onto Cuban politics in the 1930s, where a populist revolution had been thwarted in 1933–34, yet the democratizing impulses the revolution had unleashed had not yet been contained. Urgent questions about imperialism, Cuba’s national sovereignty, racial inequality, and social injustice were in the air, prompting fervent and wide-ranging debates, and these were all reflected in Mediodía’s pages. At the same time, for the magazine’s editors, the boundary between internal questions and global issues was entirely permeable: the anti-imperialist, anti-fascist, and anti racist struggles were bound together into a single battle with many interconnected fronts.

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 role in the organisation of the MWT of the ANC inside the country. Linked to and modelled on similar papers published by national sections of the Committee for a Workers’ International, Congress Militant also drew on the experiences of revolutionary papers produced in South Africa over the course of the 20th century. Initially produced semi-clandestinely, and more openly from the early 1990s, thousands of copies of each issue were sold across the country. This presentation will reflect on two central aspects of the paper: its production and role as organiser, both of which were fundamentally influenced by radical political ideas and praxes. An Editorial Committee, comprising mainly full-time organisers, had overall responsibility for the production of the paper and its political positions. Many articles, however, were written by worker and youth activists, which process often involved collective writing exercises. Organised as sites of both political education (including literacy education) and deliberation over strategies and tactics of struggles, this programme of ‘writing from below’ was arguably the life-blood of the paper. Inspired by Lenin and Trotsky’s writings on revolutionary papers as party organisers, Congress Militant was used as propaganda tool in struggles (here the presentation will focus on two campaigns: the organisation of Self-Defence Units in the early 1990s and a campaign to radicalise the South African Clothing and Textile Workers’ Union), recruiter, fund-raiser and as the scaffolding for the organisational structure of the MWT of the ANC. The presentation will explore the dynamics inherent in the co-existence of the commitment to participatory practices in the production the paper with the objectives of articulating and propagating ‘a line’, the formulation of which ultimately rested with the Editorial Committee.

The Chinese bimonthly journal World Literature (shijie wenxue,《世界文学》) was founded in 1953, run by the Chinese Writers’ Association. It was the only journal for translated literature in China before the 1970s. The journal was initially titled Translation (yiwen,《译 文》) [Fig.2] and was changed to World Literature in 1959. It is still being published today after the suspension during the Cultural Revolution between 1966 and 1977.

As part of the cultural engagements for Afro-Asian solidarity in the bipolar world of Cold War, writers from Africa and Asia conducted the movement of literature translation in the fifties and sixties of last century. Between the late 1950s and the mid-1960s before the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the translation of African literature in China experienced a prosperous period with unprecedented scale of a wide range of African writers. However, since the 1980s until recent years, African literature translation and studies in China mainly focused on several internationally renowned writers such as Chinua Achebe and the Nobelists J.M. Coetzee and Wole Soyinka. Moreover, the history of African literature translation during that period is often absent in the current narratives about Sino-foreign literary relations or the history of translated literature in China. What is behind the shift? What is the inspiration for today’s African literature studies in China? What can we learn from the literary movement, which was motivated by the histories and realities of the Third World, in regard to the increased Africa-China engagements and the discussions of the global south currently? To lay out the ground upon which these questions may be answered, it is necessary to revisit and unfold the history.

Based on the first-hand archival material of the World Literature journal published from 1953 to 1966, this paper provides a detailed analysis of the translation and introduction of African literature in China. As the only officially recognised and issued journal for translated literature in China, World Literature published around one hundred pieces of literary works by African writers and fifteen pieces of literary reviews by writers from China and other countries. The later world-renown writers such as Chinua Achebe and Sembene Ousmane were introduced to Chinese readers in as early as the beginning of 1960s. World Literature also published several special collections of African poems and special issues of Afro-Asian literature. Tracing the route of African literature in World Literature journal, this paper unpacks its relations with China’s domestic literature mechanism and the Afro-Asian literature movements during that period. This paper also argues that, the entry of African literature to China is significant to Chinese writers’ reimagination and reconstruction of the “world literature” beyond the socialist-realist paradigm of the Soviet Union’s camp. A revisit to this history of literature translation, besides its significance to our understanding of the Afro-Asian solidarity during that period through the lens of literature, would hopefully contribute to exploring the connections and tensions within the global south today.

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 organisation of scientists organized under the aegis of the World Federation of Scientific Workers (WFSW). The Vijnan Karmee as the mouthpiece of the ASWI published a variety of issues ranging from domestic science policy, disarmament, and history of science and working conditions of scientists. The monthly magazine slowly evolved as a platform for the articulation of a progressive vision of science, especially the role that science should play in a newly Independent country. In the 1950’s, the emergence of the Third World as a political imagination triggered an articulation for an ‘Asian Science’ in the pages of Vijnan Karmee.  As the solidarities among nations of the Third World crystallized into the Non Aligned Movement the Vijnan Karmee became the arena where Afro- Asian solidarity and collaboration for science found expression. In my paper I will argue that the Vijnan Karmee holds the unique reputation of being a periodical which was trying to articulate solidarity and collaboration for a progressive common Afro-Asian agenda for science. I will further argue that articles that appeared around this theme in the magazine didn’t just include an inventory of areas of research but also articulated the cognitive and historical need for such solidarities and collaboration.

The Malayalam journal Prabhatham was launched in 1935 with the emergence of a Congress Socialist cell within the nationalist party in Kerala. From its inception it was subjected to censorship and surveillance by the colonial government as the newspaper began to create a universe of reporting that introduced a socialist vocabulary into Malayalam, evolved new words for talking about society and equality, and envisaged a new geography of revolution in the world. It was a short-lived newspaper curtailed both by the formation of the communist party as much as colonial repression.

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. In 1927, the Messenger periodical in New York heralded the ICU as ‘the largest economic organisation of black men in the world’, and a decade later, C. L. R. James likened Kadalie to Toussaint L’Ouverture, proclaiming, ‘It will be difficult to overestimate what Kadalie achieved between 1919 and 1926 . . . . The real parallel to this movement is the mass rising in San Domingo’. Fundamental to the ICU’s success was its widely read magazine, the Workers’ Herald (1923-29). Although the Workers’ Herald reflected the ICU’s many competing political traditions, the revolutionary message expressed in the report on the 1925 annual conference was a constant: ‘We must prevent the exploitation of our people on the mines and on the farms, and obtain increased wages for them. We shall not rest there. We will open the gates of the Houses of Legislation, now under the control of the white oligarchy, and from this step we shall claim equality of purpose with the white workers of the world to overthrow the capitalist system of Government and usher in a co-operative Commonwealth one’. In addition to tracing the revolutionary discourse of the Workers’ Herald, the paper addresses several further questions. First, the relationship between the Workers Herald and its competitors within the public and counter-public spheres is investigated. Both the white and the black South African press reported negatively on the ICU, though the impact of the black press’s hostile coverage was moderated both by the low literacy levels of its potential readership, and by the fact that the Workers’ Herald attracted many more readers. The literacy rate among black South Africans was 9, 9% in 1921 and by 1931 had risen only to 12, 5%. With circulation figures of 27,000 at its peak in May 1927, the Workers’ Herald was by far the most popular newspaper (2,300 for Imvo Zabantsundu; 3,000 for Ilanga lase Natal; 4,000 for the ANC’s mouthpiece Abantu Batho; and 3,000-6,000 for the Chamber of Mines-backed Umteteli wa Bantu). Secondly, the (critical and utopian) cartoons in the Workers’ Herald are considered. Drawn by James Christie Scott, the cartoons communicated the ICU message to semi-literate and illiterate union members. Thirdly, the relationship of the Workers’ Herald to transnational trade union, anti-colonial and anti-racist publications is discussed. By contrast to the hostile Southern African political landscape, the ICU and the Workers’ Herald received a generous reception in the North Atlantic counter-public sphere, with positive reports on the ICU appearing in Garveyite, socialist and communist publications in the United States, Britain, Australia and the Soviet Union, and articles by Kadalie published in A. Philip Randolph’s The Messenger and R. Palme Dutt’s The Labour Monthly. Finally, the ICU’s message of international socialism communicated via the Workers’ Herald is contrasted to the nationalist ideology expressed by the African National Congress (ANC), both in the 1920s and the 2020s.