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

Abstract

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, Country.7.