Date: Thursday 23 April – Friday 24 April 2020

Venue: Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape, South Africa

Deadline for Abstracts: 30 November 2019 to revolutionarypapers@gmail.com

This workshop is co-organised by Centre for Humanities Research and Department of History, University of the Western Cape; Faculty of English, University of Cambridge; Department of Sociology, London School of Economics, and co-sponsored by the Cambridge-Africa ALBORADA Research Fund and the Postcolonial Print Cultures International Research Network.

This workshop will examine 20th century periodicals and related print ephemera – including newspapers, cultural and literary journals, magazines, manifestoes, newsletters and political pamphlets – as sites of Left, anti-imperial and anti-colonial critical production throughout decolonization, anti-Apartheid struggles, and the post-colonial era in the Global South. During this time the periodical acted as a conduit and a catalyst of collective critique and literature, discussion, and self-definition in multiple contexts and countries. This was made possible by the periodicals’ flexibility, its circulatory power, its capacity to foster intellectual and literary scenes, and its ability to form fields of political, cultural and social thought. These were developed through features such as records of debates, clubs and gatherings, essays, letters to the editor, translations, news, local and international literature, photography, and visual art. The workshop will explore these dynamics through an engagement with specific periodicals, focusing on three interrelated streams that explore periodicals as counter-institutional, counter-political, and counter-cultural.