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

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.