anticolonial creativity – Revolutionary Papers

The Negro World

Mishca Peters — Tue, 11 Mar 2025 15:13:27 +0000

The Negro World was a newspaper published in Harlem, New York between 1918 and 1933. It was the paper of UNIA, the Universal Negro Improvement Association, founded by Marcus Garvey in 1914.

Palestinian bayan

Mishca Peters — Thu, 31 Oct 2024 08:50:48 +0000

Communiques were central to the coordination of the mass popular uprising that challenged Israeli rule over Palestinians from 1987 until the early 1990s. These short political texts were called manasheer or bayanat al-Intifada, in Arabic. The Teaching Tool, Manasheer of the First Palestinian Intifada, profiles one such bayan, the first of the serialized bayanat distributed by the Unified Leadership of the Intifada (UNLI) on 8 January 1988. Authored by the local, underground, and anonymous leadership and illicitly distributed by radio or in print and laid on doorsteps and bus stops, or strewn in grocery aisles and plastered to walls, the bayanat became a central feature of life during the Intifada. The bayanat enabled the collective organizing of the popular anticolonial revolt by communicating with the public while the UNLI cadres distributing the bayanat evaded Israeli surveillance and arrest. … read more

Lotus

Mishca Peters — Wed, 21 Aug 2024 10:00:42 +0000

Lotus was the trilingual (Arabic, English, and French) journal published by the Afro-Asian Writers Association from 1968 to 1991. Initially headquartered in Cairo, but with the French and English editions printed out of East Germany, the journal relocated to Beirut in 1973 following Anwar Sadat’s peace treaty with Israel and the consequent Arab boycott of Egypt, and again to Tunis in 1982 following the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Lotus was discontinued in the early 1990s after the fall of the Soviet Union, which had provided the bulk of funding for the journal’s operations. There have been recent attempts to revive Lotus in the 2010s, but with mixed success. The editors-in-chief of Lotus was Yusuf Sebai in the Cairo years, Faiz Ahmed Faiz in the Beirut years, and Ziyad Abdel Fattah in the Tunis years. The print run was around 5,000 copies, and, with the exception of some bookstores, the readership was mostly by subscription. Issues of the magazine ranged between 80 and 150 pages, and were richly illustrated throughout. The content included a variety of genres, from academic essays to poems, from transcriptions of important speeches to political manifestos, from short stories to conference motions and resolutions, from readers’ letters to reports on important world events… read more