These items of liberatory press in the form of the newspapers, journals and papers such as Inqaba ya basebenzi gave space for publicised and collective expression of dissent against the injustice of the dominant social order. Periodicals which highlight key engagements of critiques of current socio-economic and political ills, but also resolutions and active movements within the organisation. Inqaba ya basebenzi was produced by the underground movement in exile in English and local African languages. After 1989 the journal was transformed into a supplement and gave way for the Congress Militant, by 1990 Inqaba ya basebenzi had reached 28 issues in English and 4 other local languages with topics ranging from the political status within Southern Africa as well as international coverage.

Initially, it was a monthly publication, but as the years passed, it transitioned to a fortnightly circulation, and finally, in 1987, it became a weekly magazine. Despite the challenges of censorship and the spacing of issues, the magazine persevered, providing profound news analysis that was a testament to the resilience of the human spirit and an inspiration to all who value freedom of information.

APSI magazine was not just a publication but a beacon of high-quality, in-depth information. Its subscribers, predominantly social sciences and humanities professionals, were hungry for international political analysis when such information was scarce due to Chile’s international isolation. Despite the editors’ expectations of international organizations and embassies subscribing, the magazine attracted many professionals seeking quality information about the world in a context where most Chilean media were censored or sympathetic to the regime.

Arturo Navarro Ceardi, a journalist and sociologist, was the first director of APSI. Navarro was linked to the leftist party Movimiento de Acción Popular Unitaria (MAPU). Navarro directed the magazine until 1982, when the dictatorship forced him to leave his post due to intense pressure from the dictatorship. Marcelo Contreras, a journalist linked to MAPU, was its second and last director. The political climate under the dictatorship was a challenge and a constant struggle for APSI’s leadership. They faced intense pressure, censorship, and even personal threats.

The magazine’s founding team, all left-leaning, included Hilda López, Eduardo Araya, Carlos Catalán, John Dinges, Rafael Otano, Marcelo Contreras, and Sergio Marras. Despite their political leanings, APSI’s hallmark was its independence from political parties.

In ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi, Hawaiian language, the word huli contains multiple kaona (contextually dependent meanings) and thus evokes many layered interpretations and political overtones. In their coauthored Hawaiian Dictionary, the scholar and composer Mary Kawena Pukui and the linguist Samuel H. Elbert recorded the following definitions of huli: “To turn, reverse; to curl over, as a breaker; to change, as an opinion or manner of living. To look for, search, explore, seek, study. Section, as of a town, place, or house. Taro top, as used for planting.” More pointedly, the prominent Hawaiian sovereignty leader, anti-imperialist activist, poet, and political science scholar Haunani-Kay Trask described huli as the desire to “overturn,” or “the need to transform the current political and economic system to construct a new order, not merely soften up the existing one.” Alluding to these interdependent meanings of knowledge, agriculture, and revolution, Huli the periodical encouraged the people of Hawaiʻi to commit to shared class struggle across racial, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds in opposition to intensifying capital investment and military entrenchment in Ka Pae ʻĀina o Hawaiʻi, the Hawaiian archipelago, following US “statehood” in 1959.

The significance of the periodical for historians belies its short life. Far from simply a nationalist party organ, Uganda Renaissance is part of the history of Cairo’s ascendency as a radical Afro-Asian hub. Kale’s office – officially that of the Foreign Mission of the Uganda National Congress – on Ahmad Hishmat Street was one of several offices for sub-Saharan liberation movements housed here by the end of the 1950s. Resident activists shared meals and debates with Egyptian intellectuals through the ‘infrastructures of solidarity’ surrounding the recently formed African Association. The publication of a periodical was an obvious activity for such an office: Gamal Abdel Nasser’s government provided office equipment and financed printing at Mondiale Press, and from 1957 the multi-lingual periodical Nahdatu Ifriquiah (African Renaissance) served as a model for budding editors like Kale.

Kale was no stranger to publishing when he arrived in Cairo in late 1957. He had spent the previous months working for the Uganda National Congress at their office in Katwe, Kampala, where Ugandan press ventures like Uganda Eyogera were struggling to inform readers of the fast-moving political scene amid repressive permit laws under British colonial administration. Kale had been involved in publishing at Makerere University College too, where student magazines were launched and banned recurrently in the 1950s – until he was expelled in 1956 for attending a conference of the Soviet-sponsored International Union of Students. Uganda Renaissance was quickly added to the list of proscribed publications in British colonial East Africa.

The pages of Uganda Renaissance demonstrate the editorial experimentation that was possible in an ecology of print where the usually prohibitive start-up costs of publishing were met by an anticolonial patron. Far from simply reproducing dominant anti-imperialist slogans, Kale cut and pasted material from his own pamphlets and brought together eclectic content to follow his interests: the 1916 poem ‘Africa’ by Rabindranath Tagore and a liberation song from central Kenya; an account of the plight of Batutsi refugees in East Africa, and a copy of the Sanniquellie Declaration that was the basis for the Ghana-Guinea federation… read more

The literary magazine, however fragile and limited as infrastructure, offered Caribbean writers a way to publish at home and to be circulated both at home and abroad. They made the careers of writers such as George Lamming, Derek Walcott, and Suzanne and Aimé Césaire, Alejo Carpentier, Nicolás Guillén, and many others. They made these careers by alternating between aesthetically launching the Caribbean into literary and geopolitical visibility and facilitating circulation to larger scale infrastructures in literary centers in Paris, London, Madrid, New York, and Mexico City.

Although my research is broader, I draw specifically on the following literary periodicals:

1. Tropiques (Fort de France, Martinique, 1941-1945)

Language: French (and some Kreyol)

Type: quarterly, no advertisements, subject to Vichy censorship for half-run, mostly literary publication including French literary works alongside local work and scattered work in translation from Spanish, includes literary and social theory fomenting black consciousness and increasingly evincing a Marxist political perspective, especially in second half  of run

Circulation: French Antilles, Haiti, Cuba, Curaçao, Mexico, New York, Alexandria, Chile, Venezuela

Editorial Collective: Aimé Césaire, Suzanne Césaire, René Ménil

2. BIM (Bridgetown, Barbados, 1942-1972)

Language: English (and various local dialects)

Type: semi-annual exclusively literary and programmatically apolitical periodical, financed by advertisements, demonstrating colonial self-censorship, dedicated to local literary production and becoming increasingly regional in scope in the late 1940s

Circulation: British West Indies and England

Editorial Collective: Frank Collymore & W. Therold Barnes with scouting work by George Lamming

3. Gaceta del Caribe (Habana, Cuba 1944)

Language: Spanish

Type: monthly, popular front literary critical and political periodical secretly financed by Cuban CP

Circulation: Haiti, Curaçao, Mexico, U.S., Venezuela, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay

Editorial Collective: Nicolás Guillén, Mirta Aguirre, Jose Antonio Portuondo, Angel Augier

Congress Militant, paper of the Marxist Workers’ Tendency (MWT) of the ANC, was published between the late 1980s and 1996 (when it was replaced by Socialist Alternative). As the more propagandistic accompaniment to the theoretic journal, Inqaba ya Basebenzi (published in exile from 1981) the paper played a crucial role in the organisation of the MWT of the ANC inside the country. Linked to and modelled on similar papers published by national sections of the Committee for a Workers’ International, Congress Militant also drew on the experiences of revolutionary papers produced in South Africa over the course of the 20th century. Initially produced semi-clandestinely, and more openly from the early 1990s, thousands of copies of each issue were sold across the country. This presentation will reflect on two central aspects of the paper: its production and role as organiser, both of which were fundamentally influenced by radical political ideas and praxes. An Editorial Committee, comprising mainly full-time organisers, had overall responsibility for the production of the paper and its political positions. Many articles, however, were written by worker and youth activists, which process often involved collective writing exercises. Organised as sites of both political education (including literacy education) and deliberation over strategies and tactics of struggles, this programme of ‘writing from below’ was arguably the life-blood of the paper. Inspired by Lenin and Trotsky’s writings on revolutionary papers as party organisers, Congress Militant was used as propaganda tool in struggles (here the presentation will focus on two campaigns: the organisation of Self-Defence Units in the early 1990s and a campaign to radicalise the South African Clothing and Textile Workers’ Union), recruiter, fund-raiser and as the scaffolding for the organisational structure of the MWT of the ANC. The presentation will explore the dynamics inherent in the co-existence of the commitment to participatory practices in the production the paper with the objectives of articulating and propagating ‘a line’, the formulation of which ultimately rested with the Editorial Committee.

The Chinese bimonthly journal World Literature (shijie wenxue,《世界文学》) was founded in 1953, run by the Chinese Writers’ Association. It was the only journal for translated literature in China before the 1970s. The journal was initially titled Translation (yiwen,《译 文》) [Fig.2] and was changed to World Literature in 1959. It is still being published today after the suspension during the Cultural Revolution between 1966 and 1977.

As part of the cultural engagements for Afro-Asian solidarity in the bipolar world of Cold War, writers from Africa and Asia conducted the movement of literature translation in the fifties and sixties of last century. Between the late 1950s and the mid-1960s before the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the translation of African literature in China experienced a prosperous period with unprecedented scale of a wide range of African writers. However, since the 1980s until recent years, African literature translation and studies in China mainly focused on several internationally renowned writers such as Chinua Achebe and the Nobelists J.M. Coetzee and Wole Soyinka. Moreover, the history of African literature translation during that period is often absent in the current narratives about Sino-foreign literary relations or the history of translated literature in China. What is behind the shift? What is the inspiration for today’s African literature studies in China? What can we learn from the literary movement, which was motivated by the histories and realities of the Third World, in regard to the increased Africa-China engagements and the discussions of the global south currently? To lay out the ground upon which these questions may be answered, it is necessary to revisit and unfold the history.

Based on the first-hand archival material of the World Literature journal published from 1953 to 1966, this paper provides a detailed analysis of the translation and introduction of African literature in China. As the only officially recognised and issued journal for translated literature in China, World Literature published around one hundred pieces of literary works by African writers and fifteen pieces of literary reviews by writers from China and other countries. The later world-renown writers such as Chinua Achebe and Sembene Ousmane were introduced to Chinese readers in as early as the beginning of 1960s. World Literature also published several special collections of African poems and special issues of Afro-Asian literature. Tracing the route of African literature in World Literature journal, this paper unpacks its relations with China’s domestic literature mechanism and the Afro-Asian literature movements during that period. This paper also argues that, the entry of African literature to China is significant to Chinese writers’ reimagination and reconstruction of the “world literature” beyond the socialist-realist paradigm of the Soviet Union’s camp. A revisit to this history of literature translation, besides its significance to our understanding of the Afro-Asian solidarity during that period through the lens of literature, would hopefully contribute to exploring the connections and tensions within the global south today.

The shutting down of autonomous Black educational spaces that were started by students at universities, and the mass-popular nature of the uprisings had led to a situation where the movement wasn’t engaged in the type of critical education work that had initially been its basis. Furthermore, despite some isolated attempts by Black students to build relationships with progressive organisations beyond the academy, #feesmustfall and #outsourcingmustfall remained primarily centred on universities.

As a response to this combination of circumstances, Pathways converged as a group of people who wanted to continue the work to which we had been participating on campus; collectively discussing and planning the non-partisan movement and struggles for free education. We wanted to create a space to learn about, participate in, and contribute to the debates around free education, and through that, build relationships with people and collectives working in different sectors who were interested and committed to the project of free education. We had the position that education is something that implicates and affects everyone, and is connected to struggles around wages, disability, land, patriarchy, sexuality, housing, etc.

Pathways’ work has been based on a ‘community-building’ approach to publishing. By this, we mean gathering people and getting perspectives on free education – the movement ,histories, and debates – from people working and organising in different fields and different places. This includes students from different institutions and levels, workers and organisers from trade unions, progressive academics, social movement activists and others.