‘Periodicals Were the Beating Hearts of Global Movements’: An Interview with Mahvish Ahmad, Koni Benson, and Hana Morgenstern of Revolutionary Papers

In April 2022, I took part in the Revolutionary Papers conference held at Community House in Cape Town, South Africa. The conference was part of the larger Revolutionary Papers project, a transnational research collaboration on twentieth-century periodicals of anti-colonial, anti-imperial, and left movements in the Global South, which explores how ‘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’. While the project recovers and analyses revolutionary periodicals in hidden and neglected archives, it also emphasises the organising around these publications, showing us how social histories remain relevant for present-day liberation movements. For the project, the social and political contexts in which the revolutionary periodicals were produced matter as much as the written word.

Revolutionary Papers bridges the often decoupled political and intellectual spheres, bringing together scholars, activists, artists, students, editors, organisers, and archivists who work on, and/or are part of, periodicals from across the world. The research on these periodicals can be found on the Revolutionary Papers website in the form of Teaching Tools — free, digital resources that present periodicals in context and are designed for educators and organisers to read and teach with. This pedagogic form reflects the political commitments of the project’s co-founders, Dr Mahvish Ahmad, Dr Koni Benson, and Dr Hana Morgenstern, who are driven by a desire to place radical public history in the service of contemporary movement-building.

In September 2023, I interviewed Mahvish, Koni, and Hana. The text below is an edited version of our conversation.

Marral Shamshiri

Hello, everyone. Can you introduce yourselves and Revolutionary Papers — where did the idea for this project come from?

Mahvish Ahmad

The project historically emerged from a conversation between Hana and I when I was a PhD student and Hana was a newly arrived lecturer of postcolonial literature at the University of Cambridge. We both shared a frustration with the abstraction of postcolonial theory and other critiques of colonialism from the actual materials produced by political movements in the heat of struggle against empire. I had come to the PhD from organising on the left in Pakistan. I found a real gap between what passed as critical discourse within the academy in the Global North, even by people studying Pakistan and South Asia, and what political organisers and workers in Pakistan experienced as the important intellectual and political questions while organising to rebuild the Pakistani left in the aftermath of its destruction during the Cold War. A wealth of materials and people, especially our wonderful old comrade uncles and aunties, are rarely included in the narration of history from Pakistan.

I began a postdoc at the University of the Western Cape (UWC), where Koni Benson works, in a project called Other Universals at the Centre for Humanities Research. An aim of the project was to explore universalist political claims that emerged in anti-colonial struggle through a network of universities in South Africa, Ethiopia, Ghana, Barbados, and Lebanon. While I was there, Hana and I got a small pot of money for a workshop on revolutionary papers. We needed to find somebody rooted in the political and intellectual milieu of Cape Town. Everyone I spoke to pointed me towards Koni. So, I found Koni in her office, and the rest is history. I’m speaking on behalf of you, Koni — Koni is a self-described radical archives nerd, but also a political organiser linked to current movements in Cape Town. It is through Koni’s deep links – as you experienced, Marral – that the conference in Cape Town took the shape that it did. The project was initially planned as a small workshop, which we postponed because of Covid-19. That was a blessing in disguise, as it led the three of us to talk in more detail about revolutionary papers — and the project grew.

Hana Morgenstern

I actually got into periodicals because I used to be a creative writer and community-based artist. I worked in prisons, juvenile detention, and inner-city schools. I made journals with kids, sometimes with people in prison. We occasionally hosted community nights to publicise the journals. I knew that all marginal, experimental, or political literary scenes had publications attached to them in some way — today they’re usually online. When I started my PhD, I came across al-Jadid, a journal which contained records of Palestinian relations with anti-colonial movements during the 1950s. The journal’s content challenges assumptions that there was a disconnect between these movements and Palestinians living in Israel in the 1950s. Al-Jadid showed that ‘48-Palestinians were connected to the Arab world, to other anti-colonial movements, and to communist Jews from the Arab world. I was blown away. The journals were available in academic libraries at universities like Harvard and Brown and they were also held in the Israeli national library. They were not accessible to everyone, but they were not hidden.

As I did more research, I realised that almost all cultural resistance projects, mostly Palestinian, but also oppositional collaborations between Palestinians and Israeli Jews, were recorded in these journal-like publications. I didn’t know the global context yet, but I understood that marginal radical work happened and could be found. Later, the literary historian Refqa Abu-Remaileh introduced me to the specific Palestinian term for journal literature, adab maqalat, as opposed to literature published in books. If you only look at Palestinian literature through books, you miss a massive amount of work, especially pre-1948, when Palestinian literary scenes were almost entirely published in journals. As you can imagine, when you have few resources and are dealing with people across multiple spaces, journals are an efficient organising tool. I began to recognise the significance of journals in the Arab world, in Asia, in Africa, and in Latin America. That’s when I got the idea, originally, for a project on anti-colonial journals and started talking to Mahvish and then Koni.

Koni Benson

I didn’t know that you made journals with students and people in prison — my first job was as a community-based librarian! I never thought I’d end up in academia. My PhD research was on women’s organised resistance to forced removals and housing struggles from the peak of apartheid to the present. But I ran out of time and money and got into political education work at an organisation called the International Labour Research and Information Group (ILRIG) at Community House, where we also held the Revolutionary Papers conference. This work involved using histories of organised resistance for ongoing community and worker mobilisation. I created history education materials, but I also recorded ongoing struggles within movements as a way of supporting them. For example, I documented 254 days of a land occupation in Mitchell’s Plain on the outskirts of Cape Town in collaboration with the leading activists. Self-publication within movements, as a means of self-organisation, was so different to the academic journals that I had, in a way, run away from. It was much easier to write; it felt like you were in conversation with people for a shared political project. It opened up a world of what solidarity writing could look like today. If you removed the academic context, the judging, grading, assessment, and long process of publication, what could writing do within movements?

I eventually took up a postdoc to turn my PhD thesis into a graphic novel so that it could be used in organising. I got involved with the student movement at the time, Rhodes Must Fall and Fees Must Fall, which demanded more politicised history teaching. I revamped history courses and linked students with movements across Cape Town, and I have stayed within the university since. Because of the student movement, there has been a renewed sense of urgency in research, writing, and teaching for movement-building. From the time when Mahvish first approached me, what made us kindred was how we both came to academia through organising work. We shared a commitment to writing and research in the service of radical movements. I was excited by the prospect that, across the world, people refused to concede the end of anti-colonial struggle, or to be put off by the slow pace of academic research, or to capitulate to the usual refrains that the current crises are impossible to overcome. I saw a shared understanding that deep diving into archives wasn’t just about excavating neglected movement materials, but instead that they were a worthy site to frame questions around political organising today. What kind of communications vehicle were these publications for movement-building? How could we connect to other people and projects linking radical archives to ongoing struggles for liberation? For me, these questions and an orientation of accountability towards past and current movements were a starting point for the project, and that was quite magical.

MS

It’s amazing to see the different threads that brought the project together. Writing is, as this special issue’s editors note, ‘a tool – one of many in our political arsenal – for liberation’. The Revolutionary Papers project presents revolutionary writing from across the world but also examines the collective work of organising in the production of writing. What is the role of the revolutionary periodical in a politics of liberation?

KB

What I find fascinating about periodicals is that they were sustained over a certain amount of time and required a collaboration between who was writing, who they were writing to, and who was writing back. There are, for example, letters to the editors and responses, position pieces and replies, minutes taken at various meetings, reports on negotiations, or critiques within various movement splinters. These are the dynamic conversations that are recorded within periodicals. Then there’s the question of process — how do you get this thing into people’s hands? Who prints it? Who distributes it? Who reads it? We asked participants to answer questions around process, which is not easy. The answer is not in the archive. Instead, there is a two-pronged approach of reading what’s in the periodical and figuring out how it was produced and the solidarity needed to make those writings possible.

Periodicals give us insights that we must bring back to organising today. So, as much as we need the articulated ideas, alternative political visions, and debates that we learn from movements, we also need to do the work of mobilising readerships and creating spaces for political debate and movement-building. In this project, making visible the organising work that went into making the journals, as well as the organising work around the journal as a mobilising tool, shows us the important role of periodicals in communication, political education, and strategising. When you read a publication, how often do you think about the messy drafts that preceded it? Who physically hid the periodical in their hat or under their clothes, or memorised it, or read it out loud? So much labour was involved in what was often clandestine and politically risky work. These days, many people with the privilege of accessing these kinds of archives are not interested in the real slog work of organising. For me, it’s important to look at how these periodicals originated, to honour those histories, and to insist on mirroring them in our current context.

HM

Sami Michael, an Iraqi Jewish writer and communist that I research, told me that communist newspapers were once called al-qulub al-nabitha, the beating hearts. Periodicals were the beating hearts that pumped and circulated the blood of global movements, keeping the body intact and healthy. I always found this so interesting, because periodicals maintained this flow, not only between communist parties but between anti-colonial and progressive movements across the world, and between artists working in leftist, communist, and anti-colonial circles. Periodicals changed culture and art in the twentieth century, and though they’re under-researched, they were crucial in connecting movements, groups, and thinkers in a time before the Internet.

Something important we see is how many of these periodicals didn’t create silos of social areas or disciplines. Most anti-colonial intellectuals wore multiple hats. They were critics, creative writers, political thinkers, artists, or photographers. They were running the printing press. Some periodicals are more geared towards news, others the arts, but you tend to find that they address the different social, political, and cultural discourses needed for revolutionary change. So, not only do we need new political structures — we need to renew our imaginations about what’s politically possible. We need images of inspiration; we need to create new kinds of cultural practices. What’s revolutionary about the journal in these contexts is that such a small object can contain all of these things. Those kinds of journals don’t really exist anymore, perhaps only on the margins. Even on the left we tend to be segregated into the social sciences or history, very distant from cultural production. That was not the case for anti-colonial intellectuals. There’s something to be said about what the journal can do as a multiplicitous form in which different texts can talk to each other just as people in the community are talking to each other.

MA

I think a lot about how colonial and imperial violence functions as a technique of segregation and partition, as my other work is on sovereign violence. South Africa has apartheid in 1948. There’s the partition of India in 1947, and Palestine in 1948. If power functions to separate, then the periodical can function as that which, in the midst of destruction and annihilation, sutures together communities that have been torn apart. In the context of the border between India and Pakistan, which split Punjab, cross-border co-writing is a part of anti-partitionist cultural work. Sara Kazmi, who has worked with us and who is a scholar of postcolonial Punjabi writing on the left, studies this as part of her work (Writing Resistance in the Three Punjabs, 2022). Revolutionary periodicals – in the face of a power that seeks to disconnect, power that is anti-relational in the way that Ruth Wilson Gilmore describes capitalism – often provide space to build solidarity, alliances, and connections, to think through anti-segregationist or anti-partitionist politics. To add to Hana’s point, the fact that the university isolates us within our disciplines shows us how institutional power is invested in the division of radical thought. In this project we work across disciplines and regions; we try to go beyond the university. We think about periodicals and anti-colonial struggles in relation and not as being ‘over’; they are ongoing.

With Madiha Tahir, I cofounded a periodical in Pakistan called Tanqeed, which I then ran for a few years. For us, as for those who published periodicals out of movements, self-publishing periodicals is cheap and easy. It is also a lot of work, which draws in a large number of people who do the slog work of organising which Koni mentioned earlier. I know this from our time at Tanqeed. So much of our work was about soliciting pieces, carefully editing them, going back and forth with writers, fixing digital layouts, translating between Urdu and English. None of this labour was visible, and yet, this work was as essential as the essays and pieces we published.

Very often, the labour that goes into sustaining spaces for the flourishing of critical thought and politics is erased when we recount the histories of anti-colonialism and the left. This means that it is often men, who had the time and space to write, who are celebrated as the pioneers of political theory from the Global South, for instance, Gandhi, Fanon, Césaire. Erased in such narratives are the most marginalised and uncelebrated political workers, who were tasked with doing the work of maintaining left spaces. Through your Teaching Tool for us, Marral, I came across Naghmeh Sohrabi’s article ‘Writing Revolution as if Women Mattered’ (2022) — women weren’t always the authors of anti-colonial, left texts, but they did the printing and the distributing that ensured that these texts were created and circulated in the first place. Merve Fejzula in her article ‘Gendered Labour, Negritude and the Black Public Sphere’ (2022) has written about the gendered labour that has been erased in historical renditions of the 1956 Congress of Black Writers and Artists, which was organised by Présence Africaine, a journal and publishing house central to the Negritude movement. She argues that a focus on expanding the category of ‘the intellectual’ – by looking for women who wrote but were ignored, for example – erases the division of labour central to intellectual production, and specifically the ‘re/productive contributions that made intellectual life possible’. She reminds us that if you unpack who wrote the minutes, who made the arrangements, who edited the manuscript, who took care of the children so the man could write, and where the copies of the magazine was laid out – the kitchen table – you unearth a huge array of women and feminised spaces otherwise dismissed as apolitical.

Our more expansive approach to the journal, one that looks not just at its content but also at its context, and at all the re/productive labour that was absolutely necessary for these papers to thrive, allows us to uncover people whose work was essential in sustaining both these periodicals and the left and anti-colonial politics more generally. They also remind us, to answer your question very specifically, that the role of the periodical in liberation politics was not just or even primarily about pushing out new ideas that people would then read and inculcate. Just as important was the process of creating the periodical, that process was absolutely central to the emergence of liberation practices. For instance, I’m thinking here of some of my other work on how these Baloch students from Balochistan in southern Pakistan – who are members of a heavily racialised and violently targeted group – are politicised into a left, Baloch nationalist movement. Their very first job as members of this or that Baloch student organisation is to pick up a stack of magazines and distribute them. That’s it. They have to do it on time and diligently, as their very first set of political responsibilities.

MS

In Revolutionary Papers, you group three different ways in which the periodical can be understood, which I condense here: (1) counter-institutional, as platforms for oppositional politics and the facilitation of alternative networks; (2) counter-political, as sites for the development of political debate, analyses, and concepts; and (3) counter-cultural, as spaces for literary, artistic, and aesthetic practices, experimentation, and development. Can you share some examples of the different kinds of writing found within these periodicals and the writers and communities behind them? I’m curious about a class and gender analysis when thinking about the people involved in the production process.

KB

I work with a journal in South Africa called Up Beat Magazine which emerged in response to the youth of the 1976 Soweto Uprising who demanded an alternative to apartheid. Up Beat ran for ten to fifteen years as the most progressive anti-apartheid magazine for youth, with a peak circulation of maybe 100,000. It was established by radical educators and featured a wide range of themes and writing at different points in time, from housing struggles to music and arts. They wrote segments on African history that you couldn’t find anywhere in South Africa, like graphic novel histories of Olaudah Equiano, a self-emancipated enslaved person from West Africa who published an autobiography in the 1700s. Through illustrated stories, it introduced readers to radical African authors banned under apartheid, such as Ama Ata Aidoo, Bessie Head, and Ngugi wa Thiong’o. Up Beat contained political debates taking place in high schools, pen pal letters connecting young people from faraway segregated places, and reader interviews. In an interview, the editor of the online publication Africa Is a Country, Sean Jacobs, who grew up reading Up Beat, spoke to me about the impact of the magazine on his ideas. It taught him about democracy and about how to start a student representative council, hold a democratic meeting, and start a journal. Jacobs, who grew up in a racially segregated neighbourhood in Cape Town, was able to learn about the lives of students in Soweto, rural areas, or what were then considered Bantustans.

The magazine’s distributors were often teachers, such as Comrade Uncle Marcus Solomon, who attended our conference. He was incarcerated on Robben Island for a decade because of his organising with the Yu Chi Chan Club and the National Liberation Front (NLF), underground movements preparing for armed struggle in the early 1960s. After his release, Marcus encountered a frustrating teaching landscape constrained by segregationist Bantu education laws and curricula. He left as soon as he was recruited to be a distributor of Up Beat. Marcus mobilised teachers through this work, which led to the formation of discussion groups to build an alternative curriculum and then to the creation of the first Black teachers union. Radical education and organising work were inextricably linked within South Africa, as well as internationally. John Samuel, the director of the South African Committee for Higher Education (SACHED), which published Up Beat, told me about how he met with Paulo Freire, who wanted to hear about South African encounters with his ideas. All of these people were exchanging ideas about popular political education for youth and students as central to liberation struggles.

MA

In the very act of writing, a hierarchy of sorts exists between a writer and a reader. A hierarchy also exists between those who can, and those who cannot, read or write. Some periodicals circulated in places where technical literacy was not high, so they were not necessarily written for many of the communities they claim to mobilise. The journal I worked on, Jabal, is one of these. It was written in English and Urdu. Urdu was not a language spoken in the north-eastern mountains of Balochistan, where the armed movement behind Jabal organised. The fact that Jabal’s writers knew English and Urdu tells us that they were elite collaborators with a movement that may have been much more diverse. Of course, there are various internal processes, in terms of decision-making and representation of a particular movement. With Jabal, the leadership of the armed movement decided on the contents of the journal, and an elite group of allies in cities then wrote things in English and Urdu. So you have the reproduction of various kinds of hierarchies.

On this point, I really appreciated Ciraj Rassool’s intervention in our conference about how the cultural orders of the school system – hierarchies between readers, writers, and publics – are reproduced through the medium of the magazine and the political movement of which it is a part. We also had lovely interventions from others who spoke about practices that challenged hierarchies, and that attempted to bridge the written and the unwritten through the medium of the periodical. For example, Noor Nieftagodien, talking about Congress Militant, shared how writers would go into communities, record stories, write them up, and return and read them out. Sara Kazmi wrote about the Mazdoor Kissan Party Circular, the workers’ peasants party circular, which was published in Urdu. The language that the party actually mobilised in was Punjabi, so they would also write in Punjabi elsewhere and perform the written word in street theatre. I think we all agree that the journal is just one instantiation of movement thinking, which has forms other than the written word. Writing is a limited mode. There are other kinds of archives to resurrect. In another collective that Hana Morgenstern and I are a part of along with Mezna Qato and Yael Navaro, titled Archives of the Disappeared, we think about the multiplicity of archives that communities living under conditions of repression are forced to create, and these are often plural and rich in their representations. Sara Salem and Mai Taha also run a website and project Archive Stories, reflecting on the plural forms that archives can take when one moves beyond more traditional imaginations of it.

HM

And if finding periodicals requires a lot of work, the next level of work is to find the non-written! Al-Jadid was launched by Palestinians who had originally put together a newspaper called al-Ittihad, the progressive newspaper of the National Liberation League in Palestine. In 1948, after the entire Palestinian press was destroyed in the Nakba, two of al-Ittihad’s founders, Emile Habiby and Emile Tuma, began republishing it under the auspices of the Israeli Communist Party. When ‘48-Palestinian communists began working on the process of cultural reconstruction after the Nakba, there was only this one newspaper, and eventually this one journal, al-Jadid, where anti-Zionists could publish in Arabic. That was all that was left after the massive destruction during the 1950s. Al-Jadid’s initial manifesto declared itself a platform to organise a new cultural and social movement based on Arab Marxist and Palestinian literature and culture.

The journal was made up of vastly different kinds of writing. Short stories documented the community life of Palestinians and Arab Jews living in dilapidated transit camps, presenting alternative imaginaries to the repressive Zionist regime. There were reports of illegal poetry festivals in the mountains or the countryside, and testimonials and reports from clubs started in different parts of the country from people who otherwise could not have met because of the military occupation and limitations on travel. Political activities from across the world were recorded, including leftist cultural conferences such as the Progressive Writers’ Conference in Syria. Literature, poetry, and essays were published from the Arab world and translated from the Soviet Union, Latin America, and the US. Debates and developments in the cultural movement were followed over the years. Journals are the place where you will find evidence of the development of cultural progressivism and Arab commitment literature (iltizam), an umbrella movement encompassing socially conscious and progressive Marxist literature and culture that thrived in Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, and the broader Arab world in the 1950s–1960s. Debates about what commitment literature was in the Arab world took place primarily in journals. In terms of different kinds of writing, it would depend on the journal’s vision but also on the needs of that political moment. Its mission would often give that shape to what you’d find inside.

MS

When you brought revolutionary papers and people from anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movements across the world together, did you find surprising commonalities and/or differences? And what insights have you developed into the broader academic and popular interest in reactivating a politics of hope by turning to archives of revolutionary pasts?

HM

At the conference, I found it really valuable to witness how the anti-apartheid movement is a revolutionary struggle in living memory. When the people who participated in the movement tell us about the tensions and shit that actually went down, we see the limits of romanticising radical periodicals and what they say about movements, and we also understand the importance of accountability in the present. Despite the end of apartheid, many structural problems, such as economic equity, remain unresolved. Organisations such as the African National Congress (ANC), once radical, have become institutionalised and distanced themselves from their revolutionary objectives. While these problems are perhaps more attributable to the power of capitalism and white supremacy on a global scale, periodicals are useful as they hold evidence of the emergence of these contradictions before they became full-blown betrayals. They also offer forums to try to work through potential problems, such as: how do you mitigate co-optation into the logic of imperialism once you are governing in an imperial world? How do you keep leaders accountable to movements? How do you instil a logic of anti-colonialism in every step of the transition from apartheid to non-apartheid? I am not a specialist, so these are only hypothetical questions, but one of the things I thought about at the conference was the importance of cultivating our ability to tolerate contradiction and to pay attention to political co-optation and structural elements, such as the rampant patriarchy and sexism in anti-colonial periodicals and movements, even as we honour their promise and vision. You will never have a pure movement, and when we look back with rose-tinted glasses, we are not seeing the full picture.

The conference also enhanced my broader understanding of the application of political theory and concepts in various locations. Mahvish has led the RP collective in thinking about the idea of the counter-political: how political concepts are developed in situations of violence and siege. I learned a lot about how people struggling with these concepts try to make sense of the world by translating them into their own contexts and using them as prisms through which they might re-organise their worldview. We look back and we’re like, oh, there were so many communist parties in South Asia or the Arab world, but what did that communism mean in vastly different locations and circumstances? Palestinians in 1950s Haifa, for example, tried to apply communist principles to their work as people who were committed to equality and democracy who simultaneously dealt with the Soviet Union as a funder or supporter and recognised its contradictions and atrocities. They were also dealing with the contradictions of being situated in the Israeli Communist Party, even as Palestinian and anti-Zionist Jews understood the Israeli state as a colonial entity. Honing in on a working definition of democracy and liberation in this context is not simple, and it may never be fully satisfactory, but they continued to struggle to do so.

MA

It’s important to remember that anti-colonial periodicals aren’t all beautiful, romantic sites of revolutionary utopia. We have periodicals like Dawn, for example, a major journal of the anti-apartheid movement, specifically, the journal of uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the armed wing of the ANC. Today, the ANC sits in government, and Dawn is canonised in the archives as a central document in histories of the anti-apartheid struggle. On the one hand, this is fine, because we can revisit how MK imagined its political direction. Yet, this also erases other political organisations active at the same time, and it draws attention away from the fact that Dawn was not merely a blank slate where dreams of a post-apartheid dispensation were imagined. At our conference, Sam Longford argued that Dawn also functioned as a tool of control, which published and circulated ideas of the disciplined cadre and tried to keep MK members in line at a time when its leadership was concerned about disorder in the ranks.

Om Prasad, who also presented at our conference, worked on a journal named Vijnan Karmee which tried to envision what an anti-colonial Third World science would look like – which was actually supported by the Indian government. He pointed out that Third Worldist ideas also shored up postcolonial nation-building, which had its own repressive tendencies, even as it used discourses of decolonisation. Approaching these journals with this non-romantic lens allows us to map the at times contradictory uses that anti-colonial ideas were put to on southern ground. Not all critiques of empire, we must remember, are equally emancipatory.

This is especially important to keep in mind today, in light of the use of decolonial discourse by authoritarian postcolonial regimes like the Modi regime in India. One of the most pressing political challenges we face is sharpening our understanding of what constitutes empire and colonialism. We need to pay attention to the traps that occur when a revolutionary movement transforms into a state form. Some of the writers from these periodicals foresaw the coming disaster of the end of formal European empires. They often had far more nuanced conversations about how empire functions. For instance, some argued that the comprador bourgeoisie in postcolonial countries were tied into networks of colonial and imperial power. We do not come across critiques such as this within the academy, where we are witnessing a resurgence of interest in anti-colonial thought. Those who are organising on southern ground – and whose thoughts are available to us in periodicals like these – cannot afford to take all statements of anti-colonialism at equal value.

KB

In terms of commonalities and differences, the Teaching Tools on the Revolutionary Papers website are designed to provide the broader context about particular periodicals because, despite their specificities, these journals were produced in movements that were fighting probably one of five similar colonists. It makes me wonder, what did it mean to speak across different colonial contexts? There were, of course, connections, but understanding differences was one of the crucial lines of inquiry that emerged from the conference. It gave me a sense of how the same political concepts could vary across different decades and geographies. Certain words like ‘communist’, ‘socialism’, ‘solidarity’, or ‘nationalism’ could be radical in one context and authoritarian or conservative in another. It also helped me reckon with difference in our current working contexts. For me, at UWC, a university established for Black students during apartheid and a place with a deep history of anti-apartheid political engagement in the 1990s, there is much to confront in terms of roll-backs since the 2000s, but there certainly is space for debate on current anti-apartheid struggles, while in other contexts, speaking out for Palestine, for example, might mean you risk losing your job. People at the conference ranged from artists to cultural workers to political organisers, and so while we might have similar understandings of anti-colonial work, what this actually means differs based on our contexts.

Understanding difference moves us towards solidarity, or what it would mean for movements at a particular point in time to be speaking to each other, or over each other. The left has a history of splintering. In part, an interesting splintering. Sometimes it’s a question or contradiction that leads to a difference in terms of analysis and strategies for ways forward. Sometimes it’s stubbornness, or claims of being ‘the true representative of the left’. Ottilie Abrahams, one of the main editors of a journal I work on together with Asher Gamedze and Nashilongweshipwe Mushaandja, The Namibian Review, adamantly probed this idea of ‘sole authenticity’ throughout her life. She questioned why one party would be chosen by solidarity movements, global political actors, and the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) as the representative of a liberation movement that had a wide range of organisations that weren’t necessarily in competition. Her idea was, why are particular organisations funded instead of the movement as a whole, even if the movement is made up of multiple organisations? Her approach to difference, evidenced in The Namibian Review, lends itself to a radical form of solidarity.

MS

Thank you for sharing these incredibly important and generative insights. For the final question I’d like to ask, in terms of public history and political education, how do you see the project, which focuses on historical periodicals from the revolutionary Global South, as being relevant for present-day movements and struggles towards abolition and liberated futures?

MA

I think this goes a little bit back to my understanding of power nowadays as a force of division. Revisiting historical periodicals also reconnects us to silenced and marginalised pasts as well as alternative political imaginations, including what the abolition of colonialism would actually look like. Discussions often went beyond the removal of the white man from institutional power and towards examining more difficult, entrenched colonial power formations. Revisiting journals can be more than simply reconnecting current abolitionist movements to radical histories. Just as the periodical acted as a vehicle in the past, histories, when brought into the present, can also be vehicles for bringing together different kinds of organisers.

If periodicals function as nodes in an entire counter-infrastructure of networks, when you find them you trace an entire set of political workers, some of whom may no longer be active in left mobilisation work, even if they used to be involved a long time ago. The wonderful thing about this work is that once you make these intellectual and political relations, you start unearthing latent possibilities and connections, and you begin to meet living ancestors. So for instance, a few years ago I was looking into this pan-peripheral, left-wing political party called the National Awami Party in Pakistan, which tried to connect urban leftists with leftists from the country’s internally colonised peripheries. As part of that work, I was looking for their journals, and as I went searching for them, I met Ahmad Salim, a historian, poet, archivist, writer, and the founder of a radical library in Pakistan called the South Asian Research and Resource Center (SARRC). I ended up working with him and his 40,000-strong collection of items on socialist, democratic, and progressive cultural and political movements in Pakistan, which he spent forty years meticulously collecting as part of a personal commitment to archiving the fragmented histories and memories of progressive politics and culture. Unearthing one historical connection made possible the creation of a new one, between me and him. This December, he passed away, and we are all poorer for it.

And yet, I guess abolitionist politics, in particular abolition as a term, is still very tied to politics in the US and Europe. This is the case whether we think about prison abolition, the abolition of police, or earlier histories of abolitionist movements against slavery, particularly the ones that we hear invoked regularly as cases of abolitionist politics in practice. Our project can help us think through abolition in other places, by placing it within a broader tradition of refusing imperial, racial, and colonial orders. What other theorisations of refusal have taken place? In the Indian and broader South Asian context, you can think about caste annihilation as a close conceptual friend of abolition. You can also consider the general strike, the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, the concept of intifada, or foco theory which travels from Che Guevera’s revolutionary practice to places across the Global South as a method of total refusal and revolution of the existing order. Or, the South African, anti-apartheid thinker Neville Alexander’s concept of non-racialism; for him, the strongest anti-racist position required us to work towards the total abolition of racial order which in turn required the abolition of capitalism. All of these concepts are spoken about, stretched, and grounded on the pages of these periodicals, showing us how racial, colonial, imperial orders have been refused in political practice. For instance, in a Teaching Tool we’re about to launch on bayanat or communiques from the First Intifada, Thayer Hastings traces how they emerged to help refuse and build a counter-structure to the existing colonial Zionist order under conditions of extraordinary repression and violence. In her book on the Kurdish Women's Movement, Dilar Dirik engages with the movement texts theorisations of jineology, which is an attempt by the movement to intervene in and refuse existing knowledge production to replace it with a more emancipatory practice of collective intellection.

KB

I know for me, one of the most exciting things is the connections the project has fostered between artists, activists, archivists, and historians. How do we collaborate to cross borders and create new materials out of these archives? We’ve learned about archives such as those held in the Ukombozi Library in Nairobi. The library is a radical archive and repository of movement materials recording the ongoing fight against authoritarianism and dictatorship in postcolonial or post-independence Kenya. While there’s a conversation across the continent about the return of artworks and human remains taken to the metropoles in the colonial period, there’s less attention paid to the return of archives. In that return, we don’t just want piles of papers — we want engagement with those papers.

Archives of radical African history are also dispersed because of migration, and much is held in living memory. So, how do we make links with libraries, archives, and cultural work collectives across these geographies in ways that feed into current movements? We find that today there is renewed understanding of the importance of histories and liberation struggle archives, and so we almost have to leapfrog over a post-independence phase in our history, when many of these archives and radical movements were dismissed, or swept under the carpet or overshadowed by nationalist narratives. The histories of many debates within movements or the writings of more progressive but often smaller movements were conveniently considered irrelevant. Reconnecting these papers to those interested in the ongoing work of anti-colonial struggle is the future of this project, which we are not necessarily trying to lead but are trying to create space for. Our year-long series for Africa Is a Country, for example, came as a result of so many exciting proposed papers for our Radical History Review special issue on Revolutionary Papers. The series ran monthly insights into new ways of seeing movement materials related to Africa and Black radical thought. I hope that those pieces spark connections and conversations to take forward.

HM

One of the things I would say, which drives me in this project, is that the left and progressive movements in general are being annihilated, constantly in a process of creation and then being destroyed and mowed down. Yet at the same time, we desperately need models, new or old, processes, examples of things to help us build towards the future. We have this Western public culture with an extremely nihilist view of collectivism and a very pessimistic orientation towards society. Our capacity to do good and work together, to live by transformative justice, to make organisations, to organise the labour force — that is all so incredibly denigrated in our mediascape. This is really crucial work to me — if there’s a constant process of destruction, we have to also engage in a constant process of regeneration on our end. And that’s one of the things that really drives me.

MS

Thank you so much, Hana, Mahvish, and Koni, for this fascinating discussion and for creating this wonderful project.