Launch of 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.

Nov 8, 2024 Brunei Gallery, Lecture Theatre Foyer, Lower Ground Floor, Historical Materialism Conference, SOAS, London

In this presentation and discussion, Revolutionary Papers editors Mahvish Ahmad, Koni Benson and Hana Morgenstern will present our new RHR special issue on Anticolonial Periodicals of the Global South and our series on Radical Papers of the African Left. We will be joined in conversation with Chair Mezna Qato to discuss the place of periodicals and revolutionary archives at a historic moment of third world liberation and internationalism.

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.

Hana 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.

Mezna Qato is Director of the Margaret Anstee Centre for Global Studies at Newnham College, University of Cambridge. Dr Qato’s research and teaching interests centre on histories and theories of social, economic and political transformation amongst refugee and stateless communities, the politics and practice of archives, and global micro-histories of movements and collectivities in the Middle East. She is currently completing a book on the history of education for Palestinians.

For more information contact revolutionarypapers@gmail.com