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

The publications produced from exile during the period of the military dictatorships in Latin America show an advanced awareness of the ideological and political barriers produced by the distortion or invisibilization of certain facts by the media, co-opted by the dictatorial and neo-imperial powers. The FBI (Front brésilien d’Information) was a newspaper founded in 1969 in Alger (Algeria) by Brazilian refugees, which circulated through several countries in Europe and Latin America until 1973. The publication had different collaborators and delegations in Chile, Uruguay, France, Holland, Italy, Germany, where it was published at irregular intervals. It was conceived as a counter-hegemonic political tool of (un)information, aiming to unmask the crimes of the military dictatorship and the state of oppression in Brazil.​

The fact that the FBI was based in Alger, which was at the time one of the most important centers for revolutionary movements in Africa, marks the particularity of its perspective, aware of the extensive effects of imperialism and attentive to the problems and challenges common to the countries of the Global South. I am going to place a special focus on certain images, themes and recurrent terms of the FBI, which functioned as shared codes to understand and name different experiences of repression and resistance in the Southern Cone.

Between 1914 and 1945, the India Office maintained a growing list of “proscribed publications” featuring any literature deemed seditionist, dissident or provocative against the British Empire. The historical record suggests that hundreds of titles and thousands of physical copies of books, pamphlets, newspapers and other published material were confiscated during this period. This paper excavates this banned bibliography to understand the formation of global anti-colonial imaginaries. Based on archival work in the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, and United States, this paper traces some of these revolutionary texts as well as the context in which they circulated. For the purposes of this presentation, this paper will follow the circulation and censorship of the revolutionary periodical ‘The Masses of India’ published in Paris in the mid 1920s, to reflect both on anti-colonial imaginations as well as into the colonial mind.

This paper seeks to make two interventions. First, it thinks critically about the conditions of possibility that allowed for the circulation of dissident texts. Police archives, intelligence records and diplomatic correspondence show that port cities were critical to the formation of the global anti-colonial. Anti-colonialists were able to subvert networks of capital, commodities and labor and employ them as means to carry out propaganda. Dissident networks often mapped on to existing trade and shipping routes. These records also show the activities of the sailors, dockworkers, small publicists and bookshop owners who were responsible for the smuggling of propaganda. This paper reads detailed police records against the grain to show that the development of this international community of radicals and revolutionaries often depended on the material work carried out by these subaltern figures.

Second, this paper will show that circulation of revolutionary texts allowed for the creation of a global anti-colonial imaginary. Newspapers such as ‘the Masses of India’ were published in European capitals and percolated through various colonial spaces. This newspaper, like many leftist organs, covered news of growing anti-imperial resistance not just in India but across the colonized world. This broad coverage brought various anti-colonial struggles into the same analytic paradigm. Furthermore, the transregional circulation of such texts allowed for members of distant and disparate anti-imperial movements to recognize in each other a commonality of experience. I contend that it is this mutual recognition that leads to the rise of universalist arguments against all imperial formations. In this way, this paper tells the story of the formation of an imagined community bound by an internationalist anti-colonial politics.

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.