Radical History Review Special Issue: Revolutionary Papers (October 2024) – Revolutionary Papers

The Periodical as Political Educator: Anticolonial Print and Digital Humanities in the Classroom and Beyond

Mishca Peters — Thu, 20 Mar 2025 09:25:15 +0000

This essay discusses how forms like political magazines, cultural journals, and party newspapers produced by twentieth-century anticolonial, left, and oppositional movements instituted practices of alternative pedagogy and political education across the Global South. These “revolutionary papers” served as a pedagogical infrastructure encompassing a critical curriculum drawn from ongoing movements, alternative histories, and regional literary production, to be used for collective practices of debate and inquiry. The essay introduces a series of digital teaching tools featured in the issue that study revolutionary periodicals such as the Cairo-based Afro-Asian literary magazine Lotus and underground pamphlets from the Mau Mau movement in Kenya. These teaching tools are accessible, interactive resources that provide archival, literary, and historical insights on movements and associated print cultures and are designed as pedagogical aids for the classroom and for political education in community settings. Along the way, the essay reflects on anticolonial periodicals as a resource for ongoing debates around decolonizing the university, and the possibilities presented by digital humanities approaches for the study of anticolonialism and Global South cultures… read more

Revolutionary Papers: The Counterinstitutions, Counterpolitics, and Countercultures of Anticolonial Periodicals

Mishca Peters — Thu, 20 Mar 2025 08:53:22 +0000

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… read more

Regimes and Resistance: Kenya’s Resistance History through Underground and Alternative Publications

Mishca Peters — Sun, 16 Mar 2025 19:46:31 +0000

This essay introduces the Revolutionary Papers teaching tool on the publications at Ukombozi Library, which houses leftist and revolutionary publications from Kenya and around the world. Through different movements’ publications, the authors map Kenyan resistance history through regimes of the colonial and postcolonial periods. A reading of Kenya’s history through alternative movements and the leftist publications produced during these different regimes contests the dominant narratives that have been advanced by the right-wing postindependence regimes… read more

Revolutionary Print Culture in the Arabian Peninsula: Introduction to the Sawt al-Thawra Teaching Tool

Mishca Peters — Sun, 16 Mar 2025 19:43:48 +0000

Sawt al-Thawra (Voice of the Revolution) was the weekly bulletin of the anticolonial revolutionary movement in Dhufar, Oman, in the 1970s. It was published in Aden beginning in 1972 by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Oman and the Arabian Gulf (PFLOAG), or Jabhah al-Shaʻbīyah li-Taḥrīr ʻUmān wa-al-Khalīj al-ʻArabī in Arabic. This essay introduces the Sawt al-Thawra teaching tool, a resource that I have created for the Revolutionary Papers project. It intends to supplement teaching and learning on the Dhufar Revolution, global history, anticolonialism and decolonization, social and political movements, and revolutionary print culture in the global 1970s… read more

Teaching International Solidarity through Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings

Mishca Peters — Sun, 16 Mar 2025 19:38:23 +0000

This article discusses the relevance of the journal Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings, a trilingual (Arabic, English, French) quarterly published by the Afro-Asian Writers Association from 1968 to 1991, for the development of critical and anticolonial pedagogies… read more

APSI: Studying the Underground Critiques of an Overground Magazine

Mishca Peters — Sun, 16 Mar 2025 19:28:32 +0000

During the dictatorship in Chile, which lasted from 1973 to 1990, a small number of publications openly published prodemocracy critiques. APSI magazine was one of them. This teaching tool shows how to read for criticisms of Pinochet in an overground magazine that could not always overtly criticize the sitting regime… read more

“Critical Realisms” in Savera: Mapping an Evolution of Progressive Urdu Literature in Post-partition India

Mishca Peters — Sun, 16 Mar 2025 19:25:14 +0000

This teaching tool is based on Savera (Dawn), a left-wing literary periodical published quarterly on the Indian subcontinent from 1946 onward under the leadership of the Progressive Writers’ Movement. The tool foregrounds the genealogy of “critical realism,” a revolutionary form of Urdu realism that perpetuated the movement’s aim of bringing about social transformation in a former colony by critiquing India’s indigenous conceptions of class, gender, nationalism, language, and religion… read more

Mapping the Social Lives of The Namibian Review

Mishca Peters — Sun, 16 Mar 2025 19:19:10 +0000

Thirty-two editions of The Namibian Review (1976–87) were published by antiapartheid revolutionaries in a decade of intensifying struggle for independence from the South African occupation of South West Africa. This teaching tool discusses the wider history of political orientations and networks surrounding The Namibian Review, presenting a creative approach to African history research and political education aimed at challenging the ongoing legacies of the colonial imposed borders of the region… read more

The Periodical as Political Educator: Anticolonial Print and Digital Humanities in the Classroom and Beyond

Mishca Peters — Sun, 16 Mar 2025 18:51:32 +0000

Clandestine Issues: Tracing US Imperialism across Ethiopian Revolutionary Papers

Mishca Peters — Sun, 16 Mar 2025 18:48:10 +0000

To this day, materials surrounding the 1974 Ethiopian Revolution that live in the archives of Addis Ababa University are designated as “clandestine literature.” Their publication was a clandestine affair; critiquing the emperor of the then-oldest Christian kingdom in the world and eventually professing Marxist thinking, they amounted to blasphemy. However, building an argument for Ethiopian revolution was premised on another heretical proposition: that Ethiopia, world-famous for having eluded European colonial rule, was a client state of US imperialism during the mid-century age of decolonization. This article employs a selection of Ethiopian revolutionary papers—including magazines, newspapers, and journals produced and distributed across Ethiopia, North America, and Europe—to provide a genealogy of “US Imperialism in Ethiopia,” a composite, hand-transcribed document of the late 1960s that has since been destroyed. Assembling materials marked by both their refutation of and proximity to US empire, this article argues that building the case for US imperialism in Ethiopia was a necessary step to clarify and link Ethiopian revolutionary struggle to anticolonialism. In the process, the article thinks with and extends the archival designation “clandestine” as both the conspiracy of alleging US imperialism in Ethiopia and an analytic for reading other transnational networks of revolutionary papers… read more