ARCHIVING FROM BELOW Revolutionary Papers Workshop: Magazine as Movement

Revolutionary Papers is an international, transdisciplinary research and teaching initiative on anticolonial, anti-imperial and related left periodicals of the Global South, and MayDay Rooms is very happy to host the collective as part of our ongoing Archiving from Below Series.

Over the last seven years, Revolutionary papers has brought together over a hundred scholars, artists, archivists and movement organisers from around the world. The project looks at the ways periodicals, including newspapers, magazines, cultural journals, newsletters, handbills and ephemera, helped create new counterpublics, social and cultural movements, institutions, political vocabularies and art practices.

This workshop will look at Revolutionary Papers’ periodicals across different locations to think together about what it means to approach magazines as archives of social and cultural movements. Rather than treating a magazine simply as a collection of texts, what happens if we look at it as a text that can be made at the intersection of a movement: a place where people met, argued, translated, organised, imagined and built political worlds?

We’ll then get more hands-on, working together with some of Revolutionary Papers’ teaching tools on Palestine and the Gulf, alongside Hana Morgenstern’s recent magazine anthology, People’s Literature in Palestine/Israel: An Anthology of Anticolonial and Socialist Writing, which was shaped by Revolutionary Papers methods. Working with these materials, we will think about how to approach magazines, newspapers and other ephemera when we find them in archives. How can we grasp the social nature of periodicals, and what frameworks would help us put these materials back into conversation with the cultural and historical worlds in which they circulated?

https://revolutionarypapers.org/