Revolutionary Papers held its third and final seminar on the theme of the “counter-institutional” on February 15, 2021. Koni Benson opened the discussion with key questions and observations regarding the creation of new spaces, networks, and communities around the writing, reading, and circulation of revolutionary periodicals in the twentieth century. Encouraging the participants to reflect on their own respective journals and the regional formations they were embedded in, Koni urged the group to consider how the political and cultural networks constructed by these publications transformed over time, and across contexts, highlighting the contradictions inherent in the “institutionalisation of the counter-institutional.” What is the relationship between form and content? What kind of practices of collective work are generated by periodicals? These were among the central explorations framing the workshop.

The seminar was structured around presentations by conference participants, Noor Nieftagodien, Hoda El Shakry, Asher Gamedze and Leigh-Ann Naidoo, alongside the following pre-circulated texts:

1. Afro-Asian Networks Research Collective (2018). Manifesto: Networks of Decolonisation in Asia and Africa. Radical History Review, 2018(131), 176-182.
2. Andrew Flinn and Ben Alexander “Humanizing an inevitability political craft’: Introduction to the special issue on archiving activism and activist archiving,” Archival Science, Special Issue on Archiving Activism and Activist Archiving, 15.4 (2015), 329-335.
3. Hoda El Shakry “Critical Histories and Perspectives on Tunisian Cultural Journals Maghrebi cultural journals.”
4. Koni Benson, “Feminist Activist Archives: Towards a Living History of the Gender Education Training Network (GETNET),” Education as Change– Themed Issue- Community and Activist Archives 22.2, (2018).
5. Asher Gamedze, “Pathways to a Free Education: Knowledge Production, Community, and Solidarity,” Funambalist Magazine 22, Publishing the Struggle p.31-32.
6. Asher Gamedze and Leigh-Ann Naidoo, “The mustfall mo(ve)ments and Publica[c]tion: Reflections on collective knowledge production in South Africa,” in Aziz Choudry and Salim Vally (eds.) The University and Social Justice: Struggles Across the Globe (Pluto Press, 2020).

Noor Nieftagodien’s presentation introduced the group to the Congress Militant, a newspaper started in 1988 in South Africa by the Marxist Workers’ Tendency within the African National Congress (ANC). Noor was a full-time worker of the Marxist Workers’ tendency within the ANC, and described how their newspaper created “a cadre of worker correspondence,” becoming a focal point for organising in both the youth congresses and the trade unions. The process for producing the Congress Militant involved workshops with illiterate workers, whose narrated stories would be written up and translated by the students. Collective readings of analysis pieces published in the newspaper were also held, in which workers would comment on points of strategy and organising. The paper was part of a strong tradition of political publishing in South Africa, and its practice emerged out of the realisation that a traditional “theoretical journal” would be insufficient for co-ordinating the struggle across the country. Noor also spoke about how the editorial was the most important, and most read, section of the Congress Militant, penned usually by exiles and students from the youth congress.

Noor’s presentation generated a discussion around the question of hierarchy in the production of revolutionary periodicals – who gets to write, who gets to set “the line,” and who has the time and leisure to experiment with form? Mahvish Ahmad raised these issues via a Baloch liberationist magazine she is working on, titled Jabbal. Since most of those in the Baloch uprising were functionally illiterate, the publication was run by the educated, who were in a minority. Thus, periodicals also come to reflect certain power dynamics, a tension that Hoda El Shakry’s presentation on the Tunisian context in the late colonial and early decolonisation period between the 1930s and 1950s also addressed.

Hoda began by emphasising how the alternative archive presented by revolutionary publishing often undoes and challenges the “progressivist, developmentalist idea of modernity” that has shaped academic approaches to the study of periodicals. Identifying the inherent polyphony of journals that often straddled the late colonial and early post-colonial periods, and often embodied a complex relationship to the state, Hoda stressed the need to view the journal in the Global South as “a collection of diverse voices… subsumed into one.” Further, Hoda suggested that a “diachronic lens” can help understand the ways in which journals moved between nationalism and internationalism, resisted both external and internal totalising urges, and crafted counter-hegemonic spaces that often flouted academic obsession with theoretical dichotomies. As Idriss Jebari pointed out, this was often made possible by the absence of other hegemonic institutions within the nascent national cultural space.

Hoda’s reflections on form helped frame the interventions in praxis attempted by Publica[c]tion, an experimental volume produced during the Fees Must Fall students’ movement in South Africa. Leigh Ann Naidoo and Asher Gamedze, participants in the forthcoming Revolutionary Papers conference, and members of the team that conceptualised and produced Publica[c]tion, spoke about the decolonial pedagogical thrust of the journal. They described how Publica[c]tion was born out of a desire to create a space for black students to write about their struggles, form links with other black students on other campuses, outside a space explicitly oriented towards making political decisions about actions. Focusing more on the process rather than the product, they did not strive for “coherence” in their editorial approach, in fact, they attempted to refuse the role of the editor altogether. For Publica[c]tion, it was crucial to resist the need to “systematise, thematise, make order,” an urge that they view as both colonial and academic.

The formal experiments, political practices, and counter-visions that produced Congress Militant and Publica[c]tion, discussed alongside Hoda El Shakry’s comparativist insights on the methodological approaches to the study of radical publishing of the Global South provided a productive concluding point for the Revolutionary Papers seminars. These explorations around the communities of culture and critique forged by revolutionary periodicals across Asia, Africa, and Latin America will be continued at the Revolutionary Papers conference in December 2021.