Department of English

This course will analyse the forms, contexts, and politics surrounding protest print forms produced by anticolonial movements. This critical-creative seminar will focus on genres like the newspaper, the cultural journal and the political pamphlet as sites for the forging of revolutionary culture, alternative aesthetics, and global south political theory. While research on decolonisation is largely focused on canonical figures like Nehru or Nkrumah, and key historical events like the Bandung Conference, periodicals offer a broader view into revolutionary struggles that can spotlight the communities, institutions, and public intellectuals who made these historical transformations possible. The syllabus will take a comparative and transnational approach, drawing examples from publications active in 20th century movements across a range of contexts including colonial India, Apartheid-era South Africa and the civil rights years in America to discuss the ways in which magazines translated and re-imagined concepts like socialism, anti-imperialism, anti-racism, freedom, or democracy within regional contexts, and catalysed experiments in art, political education, and print. 

Texts covered will include Eric Bulson’s Little Magazine, World Form to theorise the place of the periodical in Global South contexts, and Olivia Harrison’s monograph on the Arabic and French political magazine published in 1960s Morocco, Souffles-Anfas. Students will also study primary material, specifically the periodicals themselves, like the journal Umkhonto We Sizwe/ Dawn, the organ of the militant wing of the African National Congress in Apartheid-era South Africa, and Lotus, the Afro-Asian magazine published in Cairo. Assignments will push students to closely engage with the form of the revolutionary periodical and include weekly posts analysing or engaging a particular aesthetic or textual element, e.g., a political cartoon, or letters to the editor, or a table of contents. A couple of sessions will be dedicated to guest lectures by practitioners, editors and political organisers involved with contemporary radical magazines like Public-action, a magazine associated with the Fees Must Fall movement in South Africa. The final project will be a critical-creative project that can take the shape of a zine, an annotated archival reproduction, a digital teaching tool, a walking tour, or any other medium that can be developed in consultation with the instructor.