Revolutionary Papers are a reminder of the long histories of imagining the world otherwise,
that there is an alternative to our current condition.
Things don't have to be the way that they are.
Revolutionary Papers is a transnational research collaboration, looking at left-wing anti-colonial journals,
periodicals and other prints from around the Global South.
So that includes anti-colonial struggles in India, South Africa, Kenya,
but also anti-racist struggles in the US by black communities or indigenous struggles against settler colonialism.
Magazines tell the story of knowledge that circulates locally, nationally and internationally.
So they tell the story of local conversations. They tell the story of national conversations.
They tell the stories of global conversations.
And in that way, they function as a particular kind of archival material that we wanted to highlight.
The organisations featured in these magazines were all resisting colonialism,
but with a wide range of approaches and methods, some being more controversial than others.
A lot of these journals were actually really, really difficult to find.
They're still considered incendiary.
They're still considered incredibly controversial in the context that they were written in.
So, for example, the pamphlet that I work on, which is called ‘Jabal’.
That pamphlet was an underground banned pamphlet.
It took me two years to find it,
and it was only because some of the people involved in its circulation had decided
to save some copies, because otherwise it was meant to be destroyed.
Because keeping a copy of the pamphlet could mean arrest or potentially execution.
So journals that we feature are actually really, really difficult to find,
and the people who have brought them to us
really had to do some serious detective work.
Revolutionary Papers was started by a feminist collective, which includes myself,
Hana Morgenstern, a literary scholar,
and Koni Benson, a historian.
But Revolutionary Papers is a far broader collaborative effort.
It includes political organisers, artists, students and other scholars from around the world,
all of whom are involved in bringing to life the deep insights that anti-colonial periodicals house and hold.
Well, we clearly see that both anti-colonial struggles at large and anti-colonial periodicals in particular
were created by and dependent on vast, deep collaborations
between a wide range of people doing different kinds of work,
and we try to mirror that collaborative practice in our own project.
We started talking about building a kind of digital archive that doesn't just gather
scans of different journals and and projects them or shows them
like these fetishised objects, but instead what it is
that its writers, its authors, its creators were trying to do.
If you go on to the website, you'll see the covers featured
and if you click through, you'll see a description of each of those journals.
All of us who founded Revolutionary Papers in different ways felt
that the people, and communities, and movements
that had actually organised against Empire, against colonialism,
had written all of this rich social theory and experimented with new forms
of literature and art, culture, history writing,
and that this rich repository in this rich archive, was marginalised and absent in our conversations.
So we felt like we wanted to start this project
because it was there that you would find these amazing insights
about how it is that colonial and imperial violence operates,
how it is that you create alternatives in the midst of that violence,
how you rebuild in the aftermath of colonial and imperial destruction.
If you didn't have coffee shops and if you didn't have bookstores,
and if you didn't have a developed press, then this magazine might publish
the major writers of that region and that period and have them
be in conversation with each other, organise events that they can read at,
circulate them internationally so that they can have conversations with artists in other places.
It's important to me to understand how people make things
in like really repressive and difficult contexts
and how they build up kind of collective projects,
even when there is almost nothing to draw on.
I'm also really interested in just in how movements work
and you know, how people rebuild new worlds after destruction,
and the kind of creativity and tenacity that goes into that.
And I think that in their, like, really humble way, these publications are about
that kind of rebuilding and that reimagining of new worlds.
By centering the alternative worlds that these journals speak about, write about, print about,
we push back against the idea that there is no alternative to the status-quo,
that there's no alternative to capitalism, that there's no alternative
to the particular form of Western, liberal, market-friendly democracy that we have right now.
What we open up is a rich archive of ideas about alternative ways to order social life,
to order our cultures, alternative ways to live together.
The last thing that Revolutionary Papers is, is a set of conferences,
workshops, study sessions, art exhibitions, discussions and events.
It's a set of gatherings of different kinds of people, organisers and scholars,
and anybody else who's interested in anti-colonial histories and the education
work of movements, both in the past and in the present.
We create spaces for people to physically gather,
and talk about anti-colonial archives and anti-colonial journals and the ongoing work of liberation movements.
We want to continue with our ethic of collaboration across various borders.
We also want to plug into current political magazines on the left,
writing against racism and colonialism, and collaborate.
We also want the people listening to this video, if they consider themselves
as part of a broad globe spanning network of left-wing anti-colonial thinkers and organisers.
We want them to be part of Revolutionary Papers, to reach out to us,
and think with us about how we can work together,
and deepen this politics and deepen this work.