Join us for a roundtable discussion on the latest issue of Radical History Review on Revolutionary Papers: Anticolonial Periodicals of the Global South and our special series on radical papers of the African left with Africa Is A Country.

Revolutionary Papers is an international, transdisciplinary research and teaching initiative on anticolonial, anti-imperial and related left periodicals of the Global South (revolutionarypapers.org). It includes university-based researchers, as well as editors, archivists, and movement organisers from around the world. The initiative looks at the way that periodicals—including newspapers, magazines, cultural journals, and newsletters—played a key role in establishing new counter publics, social and cultural movements, institutions, political vocabularies and art practices. Operating as forums for critique and debate under conditions of intense repression, periodicals facilitated processes of decolonisation during colonialism and after the formal end of empire, into the neo-colonial era. Revolutionary Papers traces the ways that periodicals supported social, political and cultural reconstruction amidst colonial destruction, building alternative networks that circulated new political ideas and dared to imagine worlds after empire.

In Fall 2024, Revolutionary Papers has published a curated issue with Radical History Review, a leading journal bringing rigorous historical scholarship together with active political engagement.

Throughout 2023, Revolutionary Papers joined forces with Africa Is A Country to feature a series on papers on left, anti-colonial revolt from Africa and the African diaspora.

In this roundtable discussion, contributors to Revolutionary Papers including Asher Gamedze and Sara Marzagora join editors Mahvish Ahmad, Koni Benson and Hana Morgenstern in a discussion about the place of periodicals and revolutionary media at a historic moment of third world liberation and internationalism.

The roundtable will be followed by an informal dinner at Hiba Restaurant, atop which sits Palestine House, an important new hub of cultural and political organising in London. Though the dinner will unfortunately not be funded, the Revolutionary Papers team invite all to join us to contribute to this important new initiative.

Meet the speakers and chair:

Mahvish Ahmad works on anticolonial periodicals and movement materials, the intellectual and political labour of movements targeted in repression, documentary practices in sites of disappearance, fugitive organising under conditions of war, and other material legacies of anti-colonial and left movements, especially in Balochistan and Pakistan. She’s a cofounder of Revolutionary Papers (with C. Morgenstern, K. Benson), Archives of the Disappeared (with M. Qato, Y. Navaro, C. Morgenstern), and Tanqeed (with M. Tahir). She’s also a UK-based trustee of the South Asian Research and Resource Centre, founded by Ahmad Salim. She’s an Assistant Professor of Human Rights and Politics and a Co-Director of LSE Human Rights at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Koni Benson is a historian, organiser, and educator. She is a lecturer in the Department of History at the University of the Western Cape. Her research focuses on collective interventions in histories of contested development and the mobilisation, demobilisation, and remobilisation of struggle history in southern Africa’s past and present. This involves working with various archives and coproducing life histories of self-organisation and unfolding political struggles of collective resistance against displacement and for access to land and public services (such as water, housing, and education) in South Africa.

Asher Gamedze is a cultural worker based in Cape Town, South Africa. They are involved in a free-lance capacity in cultural work as a musician – primarily as a drummer and a bandleader, as well as a researcher and writer, an organiser and a popular educator. They are broadly interested in histories of revolutionary struggle, particularly in anti-colonial contexts, as well as thought and practices emerging from them and various other emancipatory struggles. Their engagement across all the various activities and forms of work in which they are involved, is informed by and attempts to extend these liberatory traditions. For Revolutionary Papers, Asher Gamedze co-authored a digital teaching tool on Namibian Review: A Journal of Comtemporary South West African Affairs with Koni Benson and Nashilongweshipwe Mushaandja.

Chana Morgenstern is a scholar, writer and translator of Middle Eastern literatures. She is an Associate Professor in Postcolonial and Middle Eastern Literature at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow at Newnham College. She currently co-convene the Revolutionary Papers and the Archives of the Disappeared research projects.

Sara Marzagora is a literary and intellectual historian of Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa. Her research focuses on conceptualisations of the “global”, both in terms of its historical genealogies and as a set of methods to subvert Eurocentric and neocolonial epistemologies. She has written about the potential and limitations of the “transnational turn” in the humanities from the point of view of three interrelated disciplines: intellectual history, literature, and political thought. Her approach to cultural and intellectual production draws on Marxist and sociological methodologies. She is currenty a Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature at Kings College London. For Revolutionary Papers, Sara Marzagora co-authored a digital teaching tool entitled Teaching Lotus on the magazine first entitled Afro-Asian Writings before being renamed in 1970 to Lotus.

Rafeef Ziadah is a Senior Lecturer in Politics and Public Policy (Emerging Economies). Her research focuses broadly on political economy, gender and race, with a particular focus on the Middle East and East Africa. For Revolutionary Papers, Rafeef Ziadah co-authored with Sara Marzagora a digital teaching tool entitled Teaching Lotus on the magazine first entitled Afro-Asian Writings before being renamed in 1970 to Lotus.

Sara Salem is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at LSE. Her main research interests include political sociology, postcolonial studies, Marxist theory, feminist theory, and global histories of empire and imperialism. She is an editor at the journals Sociological Review and Historical Materialism.