In ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi, Hawaiian language, the word huli contains multiple kaona (contextually dependent meanings) and thus evokes many layered interpretations and political overtones. In their coauthored Hawaiian Dictionary, the scholar and composer Mary Kawena Pukui and the linguist Samuel H. Elbert recorded the following definitions of huli: “To turn, reverse; to curl over, as a breaker; to change, as an opinion or manner of living. To look for, search, explore, seek, study. Section, as of a town, place, or house. Taro top, as used for planting.” More pointedly, the prominent Hawaiian sovereignty leader, anti-imperialist activist, poet, and political science scholar Haunani-Kay Trask described huli as the 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.” Alluding to these interdependent meanings of knowledge, agriculture, and revolution, Huli the periodical encouraged the people of Hawaiʻi to commit to shared class struggle across racial, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds in opposition to intensifying capital investment and military entrenchment in Ka Pae ʻĀina o Hawaiʻi, the Hawaiian archipelago, following US “statehood” in 1959.

Founded in Beirut in 1969, the Arabic periodical al-Hadaf (The Target) was the media organ of the newly formed Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). The PLFP arose as a guerrilla organization in 1967, espousing a Marxist-Leninist framework and advancing armed revolutionary struggle for the liberation of Palestine. Its rise is indicative of wider political transformations precipitated by the 1967 Arab–Israeli war, the radicalization of a Third World internationalism and New Left anti-imperialist solidarity in the late 1960s. In this context, Al-Hadaf has often been consulted as an archival source offering valuable insights about this crucial moment of revolutionary transformation in the history of the Palestinian liberation struggle. However, the periodical itself, its editorial foregrounding of art as a site of revolutionary struggle, and its visual and material form, have yet to be studied.

In particular, al-Hadaf’s founding editor, Palestinian novelist, journalist and militant Ghassan Kanafani (1936–72) played a pivotal role in defining the aesthetic preoccupations and form of this radical periodical. He dedicated a special section to contemporary political art, literature and culture and, crucially, acted as a conduit to bring on board an emerging generation of Arab artists and writers. Thanks to many artists’ contributions, the periodical itself was visually striking, showcasing a wealth of experimental militant artworks. Furthermore, it reconciled some of the tense relations between modern art and politics which had been fiercely debated in the previous decade in literary Arabic periodicals such as al-Adab and Shiʿr. Thus a new sense of political urgency and commitment through the arts was emerging in the pages of al-Hadaf.

Drawing on an archive of Al-Hadaf’s foundational years (1969-72), under Kanafani’s editorial direction, my paper aims to uncover this neglected art historical and politico-aesthetic dimension. It is concerned primarily with the role such a magazine plays in the politicization of art in revolutionary contexts. How did al-Hadaf succeed in lending new militant meanings to modernist artistic practices outside the confines of gallery spaces, market systems, and elite literary circles? How did it carry in its printed pages—texts, images and symbols—new aesthetic sensibilities that articulate revolutionary horizons? And, in doing so, how did this periodical aesthetically inscribe the Palestinian struggle and the radical left in the Arab world, within the translocal visuality of anti-imperialist revolutionary ferment and transnational solidarities that characterized the global sixties?

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 leftist organization, Perspectives Tunisiennes or Amel ettounsi in colloquial Arabic, which the regime blamed for “corrupting the minds of youth with foreign ideas”. Their eponymous publication was widely read on campus, and survived government repression in 1968 and 1973. The journal shifted from a Paris-inspired Maoist tone in French in the 1960s, to a pro-Palestine guerilla and pro-workers leaning in Arabic in the 1970s, as the Paris-trained founding generations passed the torch to a homegrown, more provincial generation. As it is currently remembered and celebrated, this journal allowed young Tunisians to broaden their horizon from the restricted nationalist frame of analysis and envisage the terms of a Tunisian revolution.​

This paper considers how this publication shaped the Tunisian post-independence generation of leftists and their horizon of thought through the medium of language and ‘translation’. We will consider it as a multidimensional process: first, the linguistic operation that exposed Tunisian student audiences to leftist debates taking place in Paris and Beirut; second, by theorizing the Tunisian reality in terms of class struggle against the national bourgeoisie; third, we will ask about the impact of multilingual publishing from French, to classical Arabic to darija (spoken Tunisian), and how it was accompanied by a conceptual evolution of the journal’s message. Underneath these changes stood a constant effort to free Tunisia from a the colonial horizon of progress and come up with an alternative and appropriated language. As such, this abstract speaks to the material history of this periodical (area 1) and its modes of cultural resistance (area 3).

This case offers an opportunity to witness the conceptual and semantic evolution across languages in an underexplored country. This paper will first evoke the thematic components of the shift from French to Arabic, namely the topics of economic and social critique levelled against the regime on agrarian reform and the role of the petty nationalist bourgeoisie, to a focus on direct action, the Palestinian guerilla and the cost of everyday life. It will then revisit these issues with examples that highlight the overall “untheorization” of the journal’s prose. Finally, it carries out a diachronic conceptual analysis of “revolution” throughout the journal’s two phases, as we assess how it expanded Tunisian imagination of independence.

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 shutting down of autonomous Black educational spaces that were started by students at universities, and the mass-popular nature of the uprisings had led to a situation where the movement wasn’t engaged in the type of critical education work that had initially been its basis. Furthermore, despite some isolated attempts by Black students to build relationships with progressive organisations beyond the academy, #feesmustfall and #outsourcingmustfall remained primarily centred on universities.

As a response to this combination of circumstances, Pathways converged as a group of people who wanted to continue the work to which we had been participating on campus; collectively discussing and planning the non-partisan movement and struggles for free education. We wanted to create a space to learn about, participate in, and contribute to the debates around free education, and through that, build relationships with people and collectives working in different sectors who were interested and committed to the project of free education. We had the position that education is something that implicates and affects everyone, and is connected to struggles around wages, disability, land, patriarchy, sexuality, housing, etc.

Pathways’ work has been based on a ‘community-building’ approach to publishing. By this, we mean gathering people and getting perspectives on free education – the movement ,histories, and debates – from people working and organising in different fields and different places. This includes students from different institutions and levels, workers and organisers from trade unions, progressive academics, social movement activists and others.

2. “(Non-)Aligned in Print: Anti-Colonial Aesthetics in Souffles-Anfas (1966-1971)”
Proposed for Counter-Cultural: Literary & Cultural Resistance in Periodicals

This paper is part of a larger book project that critically explores Arabic, Francophone, and bilingual cultural journals in the Maghreb (Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia) from roughly the 1930s-1970s. The study addresses the diversity of Maghrebi periodicals across aesthetic, formal, and ideological registers to better understand the capaciousness of the cultural journal as a hybrid genre.

For the Revolutionary Papers collective, I am focusing on the anticolonial Marxist-Leninist journal Souffles-Anfas which was published in French and Arabic from 1966-1971. The periodical’s inaugural editorials frame their mission as “cultural decolonization” mobilizing “terrorist” and “guerilla” literary techniques. Addressing the increasingly Marxist-Leninist orientation of the journal’s editorial collective—referred to as either comité d’action or group d’action—my paper maps Souffles-Anfas’ aesthetic evolution by exploring the journal’s auto-theorization across editorials, manifestos, op-eds, and dossiers. Specifically, it focuses on the periodical’s reflections on decolonization, language politics, as well as supranational political and cultural alliances across the global south (pan-Arab, pan-African, tricontinental, non-aligned).

Scholars commonly periodize Souffles’ transformation from an avant-garde francophone journal with tricontinental affinities specializing in poetics to Anfas as a militant mouthpiece of the Moroccan left focused on regional decolonization—and particularly the question of Palestine (Olivia Harrison 2013 & 2016; Andy Stafford 2009; Teresa Villa-Ignacio 2017). Accounting for pivotal historical crises and movements that shaped this period—from Vietnam to Cuba to Algeria; from the June 1967 war to May 1968—this paper considers the anti-colonial and Marxist-Leninist leanings of the journal across both its francophone and Arabophone writings.

Souffles-Anfas’ subtle tension between the ‘literary’ and the ‘cultural’ is reflected in its rebranding from reveu poétique et littéraire [poetic and literary magazine], to revue maghrébine littéraire culturelle trimestrielle [quarterly Maghrebi literary cultural magazine], to revue culturelle arabe du Maghreb [Arab cultural magazine from the Maghreb]. While its final issues excise the ‘literary’ from its generic subheading, the journal nonetheless continues to publish literary works alongside manifestoes, treatise, op-eds, and dossiers. Interrogating the ways in which Souffles-Anfas’ political aims are formally and aesthetically staged across languages and genres, I attend to the dialectical, dialogic, and polyvocal qualities of the cultural journal.

This paper analyses the socialist magazine Yön published in Turkey between 1961 and 1967. The foundational influence of Yön, which was published weekly for six years, was to shatter the taboos that smothered the words Marxism and socialism and gain visibility for them. Yön and its chief editor Doğan Avcıoğlu frequently defined socialism by referring to developmentalism and positioned it as a populist doctrine of development. Based on this account, Turkey would owe its rapid growth to socialism. Avcıoğlu’s feature articles and Yön’s encouragement were the “national awakening” of the Atatürk youth. With this national awakening, the youth would say no to “foreign petroleum, Coca-Cola, Sana and Vita [two brands of margarine],” and foreign beers, because all these were correlated with a massive network of capitalist interests that implicated states, merchants, and professors. Yön frequently conveyed to its readers news from non-Western regions with a Third-Worldist perspective. Readers would find in the magazine responses that Jean-Paul Sartre gave to the question of “How Do We Combat Imperialism?”
The magazine also notably brought the “Kurdish Question” to its cover page, in line with its taboo-breaker position. In a piece he wrote in 1966 (Yön issue 194), Avcıoğlu argued that nobody, including the socialists, had summoned enough courage to discuss the taboo of the Kurdish question and that dissolving the cultural values that an ethnic group possesses violates the foundational philosophy of socialism. According to Avcıoğlu, the time had come for socialists to consider this key issue.
The proposed paper has three parts. The first part deals with the rise of the left in Turkey in the 1960s. The second part focuses on how Yön perceived and portrayed imperialism and anti-imperialism. The third part discusses the road map offered by Yön towards a socialist revolution in a skeptical attitude towards democracy. In doing so, the paper also problematizes the nativism embedded in Yön’s synthesis of nationalism and socialism.

Between 1914 and 1945, the India Office maintained a growing list of “proscribed publications” featuring any literature deemed seditionist, dissident or provocative against the British Empire. The historical record suggests that hundreds of titles and thousands of physical copies of books, pamphlets, newspapers and other published material were confiscated during this period. This paper excavates this banned bibliography to understand the formation of global anti-colonial imaginaries. Based on archival work in the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, and United States, this paper traces some of these revolutionary texts as well as the context in which they circulated. For the purposes of this presentation, this paper will follow the circulation and censorship of the revolutionary periodical ‘The Masses of India’ published in Paris in the mid 1920s, to reflect both on anti-colonial imaginations as well as into the colonial mind.

This paper seeks to make two interventions. First, it thinks critically about the conditions of possibility that allowed for the circulation of dissident texts. Police archives, intelligence records and diplomatic correspondence show that port cities were critical to the formation of the global anti-colonial. Anti-colonialists were able to subvert networks of capital, commodities and labor and employ them as means to carry out propaganda. Dissident networks often mapped on to existing trade and shipping routes. These records also show the activities of the sailors, dockworkers, small publicists and bookshop owners who were responsible for the smuggling of propaganda. This paper reads detailed police records against the grain to show that the development of this international community of radicals and revolutionaries often depended on the material work carried out by these subaltern figures.

Second, this paper will show that circulation of revolutionary texts allowed for the creation of a global anti-colonial imaginary. Newspapers such as ‘the Masses of India’ were published in European capitals and percolated through various colonial spaces. This newspaper, like many leftist organs, covered news of growing anti-imperial resistance not just in India but across the colonized world. This broad coverage brought various anti-colonial struggles into the same analytic paradigm. Furthermore, the transregional circulation of such texts allowed for members of distant and disparate anti-imperial movements to recognize in each other a commonality of experience. I contend that it is this mutual recognition that leads to the rise of universalist arguments against all imperial formations. In this way, this paper tells the story of the formation of an imagined community bound by an internationalist anti-colonial politics.