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

Six months after Algeria won its independence, an unusual group of militants gathered in Algiers. Led by a Siamese-born French lawyer, Jacques Vergès, the group consisted of French and Algerian journalists, cartoonists, photographers, and militants. Their mission? To craft a new cultural and political journal. On February 2, 1963, the first issue of Révolution Africaine (RA) was released. Over the course of the next five years, RA experienced important upheavals: editors-in-chief were hired, fired, and arrested; journalists were trained and fled political persecution; the journal was even temporarily halted in 1965 after a coup d’état.

Despite this tumultuous history, RA became one of Algeria’s foremost French-language publications in the first decade of independence. Articles covered domestic politics and culture, journalists conducted in-depth investigations on international revolutionary movements and even reprinted letters and articles from sympathetic readers abroad. The publication had an important impact on debates about culture, politics, and society in the new nation, crafting a robust public square beyond the state. This article is the first institutional study of RA, examining how it articulated a counter-hegemonic definition of postcolonial Algerian identity alongside and beyond the state after 1962.

After Algeria became independent in 1962, the Front de Libération Nationale began a series of social, political, and economic reforms. These state policies dominate studies of  post-colonial identity, yet in the first decade of independence, civil society groups contributed to debates about Algeria’s revolutionary identity in the global South. Under Ahmed Ben Bella (1962-1965) and Houari Boumedienne (1965-1978), Islam, Arabism, and socialism became central components of national identity, defining Algeria as either part of continental Africa or the Arab world. Usually portrayed as an all-encompassing discourse, everyday Algerians in fact consumed, transformed, and challenged these narratives of belonging through civil institutions like literature or education.

Though often censored, the press played an important role in these debates about Algerian identity. RA provides a lens into the negotiation of French, African, and Arab identity in post-colonial Algeria. The publication’s journalists rejected the colonial past through a new revolutionary identity, they also strategically resisted the government’s attempt to dominate debates over the country’s future. In articulating an alternative definition of Algerian identity, RA crafted a public square of discourse that both emphasized the importance of postcolonial reform and challenged the FLN’s hegemonic claim to Algeria’s future… read more

Founded in Beirut in 1969, the Arabic periodical al-Hadaf (The Target) was the media organ of the newly formed Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). The PLFP arose as a guerrilla organization in 1967, espousing a Marxist-Leninist framework and advancing armed revolutionary struggle for the liberation of Palestine. Its rise is indicative of wider political transformations precipitated by the 1967 Arab–Israeli war, the radicalization of a Third World internationalism and New Left anti-imperialist solidarity in the late 1960s. In this context, Al-Hadaf has often been consulted as an archival source offering valuable insights about this crucial moment of revolutionary transformation in the history of the Palestinian liberation struggle. However, the periodical itself, its editorial foregrounding of art as a site of revolutionary struggle, and its visual and material form, have yet to be studied.

In particular, al-Hadaf’s founding editor, Palestinian novelist, journalist and militant Ghassan Kanafani (1936–72) played a pivotal role in defining the aesthetic preoccupations and form of this radical periodical. He dedicated a special section to contemporary political art, literature and culture and, crucially, acted as a conduit to bring on board an emerging generation of Arab artists and writers. Thanks to many artists’ contributions, the periodical itself was visually striking, showcasing a wealth of experimental militant artworks. Furthermore, it reconciled some of the tense relations between modern art and politics which had been fiercely debated in the previous decade in literary Arabic periodicals such as al-Adab and Shiʿr. Thus a new sense of political urgency and commitment through the arts was emerging in the pages of al-Hadaf.

Drawing on an archive of Al-Hadaf’s foundational years (1969-72), under Kanafani’s editorial direction, my paper aims to uncover this neglected art historical and politico-aesthetic dimension. It is concerned primarily with the role such a magazine plays in the politicization of art in revolutionary contexts. How did al-Hadaf succeed in lending new militant meanings to modernist artistic practices outside the confines of gallery spaces, market systems, and elite literary circles? How did it carry in its printed pages—texts, images and symbols—new aesthetic sensibilities that articulate revolutionary horizons? And, in doing so, how did this periodical aesthetically inscribe the Palestinian struggle and the radical left in the Arab world, within the translocal visuality of anti-imperialist revolutionary ferment and transnational solidarities that characterized the global sixties?

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 Association of Scientific Workers of India (ASWI) was formally founded in 1947, the same year when India gained Independence from colonial rule. The ASWI, as a trade union organization of scientists was part of global network of individual scientists and trade union organisation of scientists organized under the aegis of the World Federation of Scientific Workers (WFSW). The Vijnan Karmee as the mouthpiece of the ASWI published a variety of issues ranging from domestic science policy, disarmament, and history of science and working conditions of scientists. The monthly magazine slowly evolved as a platform for the articulation of a progressive vision of science, especially the role that science should play in a newly Independent country. In the 1950’s, the emergence of the Third World as a political imagination triggered an articulation for an ‘Asian Science’ in the pages of Vijnan Karmee.  As the solidarities among nations of the Third World crystallized into the Non Aligned Movement the Vijnan Karmee became the arena where Afro- Asian solidarity and collaboration for science found expression. In my paper I will argue that the Vijnan Karmee holds the unique reputation of being a periodical which was trying to articulate solidarity and collaboration for a progressive common Afro-Asian agenda for science. I will further argue that articles that appeared around this theme in the magazine didn’t just include an inventory of areas of research but also articulated the cognitive and historical need for such solidarities and collaboration.

This paper analyses the socialist magazine Yön published in Turkey between 1961 and 1967. The foundational influence of Yön, which was published weekly for six years, was to shatter the taboos that smothered the words Marxism and socialism and gain visibility for them. Yön and its chief editor Doğan Avcıoğlu frequently defined socialism by referring to developmentalism and positioned it as a populist doctrine of development. Based on this account, Turkey would owe its rapid growth to socialism. Avcıoğlu’s feature articles and Yön’s encouragement were the “national awakening” of the Atatürk youth. With this national awakening, the youth would say no to “foreign petroleum, Coca-Cola, Sana and Vita [two brands of margarine],” and foreign beers, because all these were correlated with a massive network of capitalist interests that implicated states, merchants, and professors. Yön frequently conveyed to its readers news from non-Western regions with a Third-Worldist perspective. Readers would find in the magazine responses that Jean-Paul Sartre gave to the question of “How Do We Combat Imperialism?”
The magazine also notably brought the “Kurdish Question” to its cover page, in line with its taboo-breaker position. In a piece he wrote in 1966 (Yön issue 194), Avcıoğlu argued that nobody, including the socialists, had summoned enough courage to discuss the taboo of the Kurdish question and that dissolving the cultural values that an ethnic group possesses violates the foundational philosophy of socialism. According to Avcıoğlu, the time had come for socialists to consider this key issue.
The proposed paper has three parts. The first part deals with the rise of the left in Turkey in the 1960s. The second part focuses on how Yön perceived and portrayed imperialism and anti-imperialism. The third part discusses the road map offered by Yön towards a socialist revolution in a skeptical attitude towards democracy. In doing so, the paper also problematizes the nativism embedded in Yön’s synthesis of nationalism and socialism.

During the 1920s the primary medium for activities of the cultural, artistic and political left were journals and periodicals. They served as platforms for the vanguard(-isms) in general, directing attention to other groups, initiatives, and publications. They were a gathering point; a place for sharing artistic programs and discussions, political propaganda, public debates and confrontations with readers, as well as sites for collective efforts. In The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines (2013) Peter Brooker underlined the avant-garde practice as “networked exchange” across borders thanks to the role of periodicals, which shaped the global modernism.​

In my paper prepared for the workshop I intend to apply recent studies on 1920s avant-garde journals and periodicals to develop a discourse on transcontinental networks of the political, cultural and artistic Magazines that operated in the early 1970s in Latin America, Africa and Europe. I intend to discuss Casa de Las Americas from the years of 1970-1972. It was a period, when editors of this Cuban periodical devoted one of the numbers to Pan-African Festival in Algiers (1970, No. 58) and begun to advertise Souffles and AfricAsia directing attention to revolutionary circles in Rabat and Paris. I intend to discuss their contacts and situate them on the global and historical spectrum of revolutionary, left-wing, artistic, literary and avant-garde publications. I aim to explore the “networked exchange” of these three Magazines, which entered into transnational circulation and aimed to create a platform of transcontinental propaganda of solidarity for revolutionary movements in Africa, Asia and Latin America.