Department of English

This course will analyse the forms, contexts, and politics surrounding anticolonial, left and dissident print cultures of the global south. Course materials will draw on the archive of political magazines, party newspapers, cultural journals, and pamphlets to study how these print forms shaped the cultures, institutions, and communities of revolutionary politics. Engaging the global south revolutionary periodical as form, the course will analyze its role as a forum for political debate, a tool for political organizing, and a crucial medium for literary and aesthetic experiments. We will examine revolutionary periodicals from contexts ranging from colonial India to Apartheid-era South Africa to Pinochet-ruled Chile to appreciate the ways in which periodicals often served as sites for articulating political theory and literary activism ‘from below’. We will focus on movements and political concepts that decisively shaped 20th-century struggles against colonialism, and those that followed in the wake of formal decolonization, including but not limited to Afro-Asianism, Marxist internationalism, black internationalism, Third Worldism, and Tricontinentalism. Classes will be conducted in the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, and a large part of the course will be dedicated to workshopping archival material from the collections.