Guerrilla History - Revolutionary Papers w/ Mahish Ahmad, Koni Benson, & Sara Kazmi

Episode Date: March 14, 2025

In this episode of Guerrilla History, we discuss a wonderful resource for revolutionary scholars and activists - Revolutionary Papers.  Revolutionary Papers is a transnational research collaboration exploring 20th century periodicals of Left, anti-imperial and anti-colonial critical production, and in this discussion, we talk about the goals of the project, the intended audience, and forms that this project has taken.  You'll want to be sure to check out their fantastic work! Some additional resources for you are the South Asian Research & Resource Center, as well as https://www.jamhoor.org which is a Left media platform focusing on South Asia and its diasporas.   Koni Benson is a historian at the University of the Western Cape. Her research focuses on collective interventions in histories of contested development and the mobilization, demobilization, and remobilization of struggle history in southern Africa’s past and present.  You can find her Revolutionary Papers page here.   Sara Kazmi is a scholar, translator, and protest singer, a professor of Literature and Culture of the Global South whose research looks at poetry and drama from 1970s Punjab, in particular focusing on the re-working of oral, folk genres as a literary mode for subverting the bordering logics of the Indian and Pakistani state, and for critiquing the boundaries drawn by caste, patriarchy and institutional religion in the region.  Follow her on instagram and find her Revolutionary Papers page here.   Mahvish Ahmad is an educator, scholar and organiser. She is an Assistant Professor of Human Rights and Politics at the Department of Sociology, London School of Economics, where she studies state violence and the intellectual and political labour of movements targeted in repression. Follow her on twitter @mahvishahmad and find her Revolutionary Papers page here. Help support the show by signing up to our patreon, where you also will get bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/guerrillahistory 

You don't remember den, Ben, boo? No. The same thing happened in Algeria, in Africa. They didn't have anything but a rank. The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare. But they put some guerrilla action on. Hello, and welcome to Gorilla Hand. History, the podcast that acts is a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history and aims

to use the lessons of history to analyze the present. I'm one of your co-hosts, Henry Huckimacki, joined as usual by my co-host, Professor Adnan Hussein, historian director of the School of Religion at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada. Hello, Adnan. How are you doing today? I'm doing great, Henry. It's wonderful to be with you. Absolutely. Great to see you, too. We're just entering a very, very busy phase of recording schedule, but I am very excited. for all of the conversations that we have coming up, not least of which the one that we have planned for today. Today's episode is going to be in our Sources and Method series,

but before I introduce the guests and have a non-introduced the sources and method series, I would like to remind you listeners that you can help support the show and allow us to continue making episodes like this by going to patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history. That's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history. And you can keep up to date with everything

that we are doing both collectively and individually by following us on various social media platforms. Gorilla History is on Twitter at Gorilla underscore Pod, on Instagram at Gorilla underscore History, and we also have a substack, gorilla history.com, where you can get updates of our projects directly to your email inbox for free. Just be sure that you're spelling Gorilla with two R's. Now, with that housekeeping out of the way, I'm going to let Adnan do some further housekeeping, because, as I mentioned, this upcoming episode, which we'll introduce in just a moment, is going to be part of our Sources and Method series. And when we have episodes that fall within this series, I always have Adnan.

Remind you, listeners, what our Sources and Method series is all about. So Adnan, take it away. Remind the listeners what we're doing with this series. Sure, well, dedicated listeners will recall that occasionally we have episodes that aren't about a specific event or process historically, but about the mechanics and nuts and bolts of studying history and being what we like to call a guerrilla historian.

So we look into sources and methods, methods being the methodologies and having conceptual discussions about approaches to history, research methods, and so forth. But even more interesting for me are the discussions that we have about sources, primary sources, about document collections published or edited

together like the Black Liberation Army's documents that we had an episode on or historical documents of the PLO, a book published that guerrilla history wrote the preface for, opportunities to talk about what are the actual primary source documents and records that historians can use to understand the past and make it relevant to their contemporary struggles about the processes of archiving the processes of studying and interpreting primary sources. And so today, we have some discussions with a group that is putting together and has been working on a fantastic project that really fits into the spirit of this series of making available and bringing and curating and interpreting sources that people who are interested in liberation

struggles from the past can access. And so without further ado, let's get into this episode. Yeah, absolutely. As Adnan mentioned, we have a really terrific project that we're going to be talking about today. That project is Revolutionary Papers. Now, listeners, I'll give you a moment to type in Revolutionary Papers.org into your web browser so that you can start looking at the page while we're having this conversation. But we're having three guests who are representatives of the Revolutionary Papers Project joining us today to talk about that project. We have Connie Benson, Mavish Ahmad, and Sarah Cosme.

So I'm going to have each of you introduce yourself briefly to the listeners. Kony, we'll start with you. Can you say a few words about yourself to the listeners? Hi, thank you for having us. My name is Kony Benson, and I've been based in Cape Town for the last 20 years. I've been working with trade unions and social movements doing political education, history education, and I teach history at the University of the Western Cape. I've been working on the Revolutionary Papers Project with Mavish,

Hannah Morganstern and with Sarah for the last five years. And it's great to be here. Thank you. Absolutely. Sarah, I'll turn it over to you now. Can you tell the listeners a little bit about yourself and the work that you do? So I am from Lahore in Pakistan where I've worked for about 15 years with left movements and primarily focusing on sort of performance groups, you know, who work with leftist street theater and feminist performance. I've also been part of the revolutionary projects with a project with Kony and Mavish and Hanna for the past five years. And I'm an academic as well. So my research focuses on anti-colonial and left and anti-border writing from India and Pakistan. And I'm currently teaching in the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania.

And last but certainly not least, we have Mavish. Mavish, can you tell a little bit about yourself to the listeners? Hi, thanks for having this. My name is Mavish Ahmed, and I grew up across Denmark and Pakistan. I've also lived in South Africa, the U.S. and now I'm in the UK. My political work has primarily been engaged while in Europe with anti-racist organizing. And in Pakistan, I've been involved with various left political formations, feminist. and other political parties.

And there I also worked as a journalist covering the war on terror and military violence as a university lecturer as well. My work primarily focuses on left histories in Pakistan and South Asia, especially left political movements, but also on the various kinds of counter-revolutionary violence, counterinsurgencies that have been deployed against them to try to squash them. So a lot of my work is also about tracing some of the connections around how they traveled in and out of Pakistan, these techniques of violence to squash radical movements. I'm also part of the Revolutionary Papers Collective, of course, with Koni Hana, Sara.

And now I am a assistant professor in human rights and politics at the London School of Economics and run up to a center and a hub of human rights here as well. Terrific. And I'm sure the listeners are interested in each of your research. I know I certainly am, and I'm hoping that we can talk about that in future discussions as well. But today the focus is certainly on revolutionary papers. And what better place to start this conversation than starting with what was the origin and the purpose of revolutionary papers? Where did this idea for revolutionary papers come from? What was kind of the original shape that this project took in your minds as you were first thinking about what this project would be, because it's been years now. I'm sure that the form has changed dramatically, as things tend to do over time, from what we

originally plan to what they actually become. But what is the purpose at the current time as well of revolutionary papers? So can you take us through that process a little bit? Yeah, so I'll kick us off a little bit, and Sarah and Connie can jump in. All of us, Hannah, myself, Connie and also Sara straddle a divide between the academy and political movements. And in different kinds of ways, when we first

started this project, we felt like a lot of the conversations, especially around revolutionary, anti-colonial and left politics in the global South that were happening within the academy were disconnected from actually existing and historically existing social and political

movements. We felt like there was a lot of theorizations and abstractions that were emerging within the academy, that were not really connected to previous and current conversations and issues that people were battling. So just to give an example, Hannah Morgan Stern, who's one of the people who co-established revolutionary papers, works within literature. And within literature, of course, the post-colonial turn and post-columial theory has been, and within the humanities generally has been really, really important. And what she found is somebody who works especially on Arab Marxism and Palestinian anti-colonial journals

was that post-colonial theory, a distance itself at some point from movements, often in a critical manner, you know, saying that a lot of the massive Arab Marxist and anti-colonial movements reified or reproduced the idea of the state and law and police in really problematic ways and sort of ended up in a very critical position or critical relationship to those movements. And what that ended up doing within her field, and I'm speaking on her behalf, but unfortunately she can't be here, was not really turning to the kind of literatures

and what Adan said earlier, the primary documents that were produced by these movements, the kind of theories, literary and cultural practices, and alternative histories that a lot of these movements produced because movements have always also been knowledge producers. But what we found so funny was that, all of this decolonial turn and anti-colonial turn and interest in critiques of colonialism. Within the academy, nobody was interested in the knowledge that movements produced about colonialism and about anti-colonial movements.

Within the field of history, which Coney would be great if you also spoke about more, Coney has also an article that we've, Coney, Hannah and I have written is an introduction to a special issue in radical history review. Coney speaks about how within history there was a, there has been at one point a strong tradition of Marxist and social history writing, which was more engaged with movements and movement histories, and there's since been a critical distancing away from it. And Coney, you can speak a little bit more, but again, the kind of distancing from movements. And within my field, my formal field is sociology, but also the social sciences. There's been this social sciences and humanities in the past couple of years. We've seen this decolonial turn. But a total, me, when I came to the UK to do my PhD, I was like, everybody's telling me decolonization.

But nobody knows really about the histories of any of the movements, like, or any of the major political battles that are going on right now or that have gone on historically. there's kind of this abstraction of anti-colonial figures as if the existence and distant past and you can't talk to them and they're not flesh and blood people who wrote real things that you can read directly instead there's you know yeah an abstraction of them so we were really frustrated with that and we felt like okay what's the simplest way that you can actually you know there's a movement's produced knowledge in all sorts of ways obviously they also do songs and protests and wall chalkings and art But the simplest thing, we felt like even the simplest thing people hadn't really turned to, which was just the magazines and pamphlets and essays that people within movements had written. And these kind of essays are very different from the academic essay.

You know, we really like, of course, and respect people like France Fennon and M. Cesar and Edward Saeed, who have been really important theorists and critics of colonialism. But the texts that they've written have been like single-authored texts, you know, where it at least seems like it were these sort of great men of anti-columial theory, which they did also, that was great, great writings. However, a lot of anti-columial thought is not written by individuals. It's written collectively. It's the result of a collective laborious effort. It requires more than just the writing of an essay or a pamphlet.

It requires somebody edits it, somebody prints it, somebody distributes it, somebody circulates it. So there's a lot of work because it's not being produced within the academy or in a university publishing cross. And often they were written underground on the run under conditions of extreme repression and in sort of a response to very, very important political questions of the time. And we felt like because they weren't individually authored in a nice, clean text that you and sit down and read in a book. People weren't really engaging with them, even though

they were some of the places were ideas, new kinds of cultural practices, alternative histories were being experimented at the very first time. Even a lot of the people who we now know, like the M. Caesars and the Phrenons, they also tested their ideas often in these magazines and pamphlets. So we felt like we really wanted to center those kind of movement texts and movement critical productions. And I guess what we felt, however, was of course, you know, if there is a, they're not so easy to approach, you know, like a document that comes out of, for example, a document that I worked on, which is an underground pamphlet produced by a heavily, out of a heavily

militarized periphery within Pakistan in Urdu and English, was. speaking about certain political, socioeconomic conditions at the time, it's not easy for somebody who doesn't know the background to really approach that document. So what we wanted to do was not just scan them and then put them up, which is what, for example, the British Library and a lot of digital humanities initiatives do now. We wanted to put them up and explain and introduce the context within which they were operating and the kind of debates that they were engaged with so that people who are not experts, for example, in Pakistani history are also able to read them and draw different kinds of ideas from them. And what we particularly wanted to focus on

with revolutionary, with trying to contextualize them in the form of something we're going to talk about a little bit, which is the digital teaching tools. So people who are on the website right now can click around into a thing that's called teaching tools. And you can see the different ways that we've contextualized them. We'll talk about that in a little bit. But what we found that was especially interesting was that these radical capers did a lot more than just, you know, present new ideas. They actually played a key role in, they kind of functioned as devices for the creation of entire alternative infrastructures of knowledge production and debate. Like, unlike academic debate, where you have, like, universities and, you know,

publishing houses and academic journals, which function as the physical and intellectual spaces where you can have debate for an underground anti-colonial movement, you needed to actually create spaces of debate. And these revolutionary people played a role in that. There were also places where people experimented with new kinds of ideas that have since kind of been forgotten. And Kony can speak about that. So for example, in South African, the anti-apartheid movement, the canonization of anti-apartheid history after the transition to full democracy in South Africa was done by the African National Congress,

which means that all sorts of other anti-apartheid movements and their ideas about how to constitute South African society after apartheid was ignored and erased. But if you return to these pamphlets, then you can actually get a sense of the debates about how things should look like. So alternative counter-political ideas for how to constitute social life.

And there's also all sorts of experimentations about how to do cultural work differently. And hopefully Sarah, whose work is focused on this, along with Hannah Morgan Stern, can speak a little bit about that. So that's just a brief introduction. But we were, I mean, just to sort of conclude, it is this frustration with criticisms of colonialism being abstracted from actual movements. And one of them really big contemporary examples of this is, of course, all of the academics, too far too many academics who call themselves decolonial. but have been completely silent on Palestine and the genocide because, again, abstractions and using various kinds of theoretically abstract language to refuse to take a clear political position on what's happening there.

Well, actually, that was such a wonderful account. I mean, I think specifically for any of our listeners who aren't actually already online looking at this, and I, again, encourage you immediately go to Revolutionary Papers.org. can start exploring this wonderful website. It's a website that has a lot of different components to it. You know, I kind of think in looking at it, you know, I do have a lot of questions about what was the source material and the state of its, you know, preservation or not. That's, I think, a big problem with a lot of these ephemeral publications that exist for

a brief period, that in the post-colonial period sometimes also there, a new narrative historically that's created and maybe they don't always want to remember some of those debates and discussions, you know, the actual texture of the movement. And so that'll be something that I would like to hear a little bit more about, about, you know, collecting these, where you find them, how you're presenting them. But it seemed to me that just picking up on what you said, Mavish, that it's like that you're also providing a kind of analytical, annotated contextualizing bibliography, you know, so it's not just that, okay, here's a digital file, you can look and you can read, but something that situates and contextualizes. Because for a guerrilla historian, somebody wants to use the past for their contemporary struggles, if they go back, you know, there's a context that may be missing, you know, how to approach it, answering questions. I think it's a wonderful resource because it answers questions when it was published, underwent, what conditions, some of the factors of what they were responding to. And I love also some of these

genuine unvarnished accounts of debates and discussions and disputes that were happening at the time. I remember reading just earlier today about the spearhead and seeing that there were some people who really disagreed with certain approaches or perspectives of this Tanzanian, you know, kind of a radical woman's approach. and she gets exiled from, but then comes back. And so there's just a lot of questions that, you know, one would have that are being helpfully answered so that when you go and read the spearhead, you have some sense of what to make of this, what you could use it for, what it's, how it's situated in contemporary debates, what's happening in the movement such that there are these different kind of positions being taken and also the kind of politics. of power and politics of publishing. So I think it's just absolutely such a wonderful resource

but I did want to ask a little bit about how you all envision it being used. So perhaps Sarah, you've done a lot of work on the teaching component and that was alluded to in the opening remarks. Perhaps you could tell us a little bit about who's the audience

for this and how you envision and have enabled them being able to or people, publics, being able to use these resources and how. Perhaps you could introduce us to the teaching component of this amazing project. Yeah, I would love to do that. So I think part of, you know, the work that Mavish has already done in sketching out the theoretical

and the political intervention that the project is making. And I think we'll get to that in a little bit more detail when we talk about the kind of three counter-institutional, counter-political and counter-cultural kind of thrusts of the project. But in a sense, the digital teaching tools, which is, you know, Adnan, what you were just referring to on the website, they're part of this kind of counter-methodological and even counter-archival practice that the project is also really invested in. And as part of that, I think the pedagogical emphasis and thinking very deeply about pedagogical approaches, not just for students in the university classroom, which is obviously

a day job for most of us on the project, but also thinking about political education, thinking about how this material can be used in organizing contexts or in even for members of the general public, particularly as you know, you've pointed out quite a few of these journals and quite a few of the teaching tools that we've sort of published on the website, are looking at magazines that faced intense state repression or were driven underground and are as such not represented in any institutional archives, right? So I think, I mean, the other important thing, and you know, we were asking about how we kind of gathered all this material is that this is a project that from the beginning has been envisioned as a

collaborative endeavor. So it's looking at journals of the global south. And so we're also very, very mindful about curating those conversations across these regions. And for that, you know, we had a large kind of international conference in Cape Town, which was hosted at this amazing venue, which has been a kind of center in Cape Town for movements to meet. And it was quite extraordinary to have those conversations from India and Pakistan and South Africa and Kenya and, you know, Latin America, you know, kind of putting revolutionary movements together. So really, that's how the archive of teaching tools has also been compiled, which is through those connections and the network of the project,

which is bringing together both scholars and organizers who are working with or, you know, on movements. And they have a lot of times, you know, a lot of times they have access that is through being members. in the case of, for example, you know, Mavish and Mavish's teaching tool, she's co-authored it with someone who was part of the below struggle in the 70s. So it's either through that kind of politics of solidarity. So those are the kind of almost the archival practices of solidarity, of political participation and, you know, which constitute that archive. Quite a few of those sources don't come from institutional archives.

And in terms of the digital teaching tools, you know, we wanted, just like Mavish pointed out that the kind of limitations of the academic essay form as a mode of engagement or even of the single authored, you know, kind of single authored essay form were something that came up in our discussions and the teaching tools were also a way to kind of work around that and they have they have there's you know if you've been clicking around you'll see that not all of them visually look the same that's because we created these three templates with this amazing designer called lizzie malcolm who was really instrumental to this part of the project and each of these kind of templates are take inspiration from a

a single entry point into the archive. So if you look at, for example, our tool on Teaching Lotus, which was the magazine of the Afro-Asian Writers Association, that is kind of laid out almost in a table format, and it has this kind of mapping effect to its layout. And that's because we wanted to reproduce the kind of visual experience of going into an archive and actually being able to see materials laid out in front of you and being able to interact with that and pull out things to read and explore more.

On the other hand, if you look at either the tool I've authored on the Maoist Mazur Khasan Party, which means the Workers and Peasants Party in 1970s, Pakistan, or if you look at Hannah Morgan Stern's tool, which is on Al-Jadid, which was, an Arabic language journal of the left that was working to kind of reconstruct the cultural and literary world that was kind of annihilated during the, you know, that kind of Nakpa and the catastrophe and those histories. So in that case, what we're trying to reproduce and is a kind of intimate engagement with these sources, right, enabling a close reading. And these are frequent sources, especially in the anglophone-dominated academy, you don't get to engage with sources

in Arabic or in Urdu as sites of theorizing, as sites of origin points and not objects of academic theorizing. So that kind of move to firstly de-objectify the revolutionary archive to to kind of shift the kind of academic tendency to aestheticize almost these, you know, ephemera and materials. So that was also an important part of, you know, the way the tools combine the archival with commentary with annotations. So there is obviously, you know, the voice of, you know, of course, Mavish authored the kind of linear tool on the below.

movement and of course the linearity and the historical kind of length and kind of you know sort of the sheer amount of detail that tool encompasses in its form is important because this is a community that has consistently faced erasure in Pakistani history right so so that kind of counter that that urge counters that so we have space for that interpretation and that relationship in that contemporary relationship that's being forged with the archive, but at the same time, you know, there's also, by deliberately refusing that kind of academic essay form, we want the materials to kind of take their place at the table, right, and actually be theoretical texts in and of their own, you know, in their

own right rather than as objects of a kind of post-colonial or a decolonial theorization. So this is the kind of thrust behind the different templates. another thing I just wanted to talk about is also that although we have these templates, if you start looking at more and more of our tools, for example, if you look at the one on the Ucumbosi Library, and you look at Koni's tool on the Namibian Review, you'll also see that sometimes they have elements of both, that they can be very linear like Mavish's very historical, you know, sort of historicist tool is. But they can also incorporate elements of close reading, which is what

Kony's tool and the Ucombozi tool does. And that's because you know, we really did also not want to, we didn't want to impose this kind of template onto all contexts and all texts and all archives. We also wanted to respond

to the needs and of the movement or the collective that is producing that archive. So the form, you know, as it's digital, you know, because it's a digital form, because it's also creative form, it also stretches to accommodate different kinds of demand. So, for example, in the case of Jabal, that maybe Mavish can also talk about more later,

but in the case of Jabal, the magazine that she worked on, there was also this desire amongst, you know, people who had mobile, you know, being part of it, that the teaching tool become something of a kind of repository for past issues which of course have just been driven you know they were primarily kind of functioning underground and very hard to come by so that's that's a case in which there's a kind of on the ground demand for the form of the teaching tool to stretch and i think quite similarly with the ucombozi tool the you know the the the library's mission to kind of provide that long history of anti-colonial and left revolution in Kenya had to change the form. So we're also constantly, it also becomes a kind of learning tool for us because

you know, it's our way of working with other people. And when they contribute tools, it pushes us to rethink the way we've been doing all this work. So I think it's a kind of teaching enterprise that works both ways, because we end up learning a lot about sort of how much more we also need to push our own kind of understanding of and theorization of revolutionary papers. Well, that's a fascinating process. And the outcomes, I mean, again, I encourage everyone to go check out. The outcomes are absolutely marvelous. I mean, these are basically units for, you know, a course you could do. And in fact, actually, I used to teach a course called, I haven't taught it for many years, the spirit of Bandung, and it was about anti-colonial and anti-racist movements globally and cultures of resistance. And I haven't taught it for a long time, but now I actually going to your website and revolutionary papers and seeing all of the expansion of materials and contexts and resources that are available.

I'm actually thinking, boy, I want to go teach that. course, again, because now I have available so much more interesting material that gives you the texture of these movements. And I really take to point, you know, of course, we read Fanon and we, you know, read Césaire and all of that. And they're absolutely marvelous and amazing texts. But there is also other voices that are available, but we're lost to people that you are recovering in these ephemera, these newsletters, these. these periodicals that are so connected to movements, that I think you're right, really reverses the kind of points or positions of knowledge production where theory is just, even if there may be Global South scholars, academics, and thinkers, but they're circulated in some sense through metropolitan contexts and publishing and translations and so on. and that other set of voices and textures where theory has been and can be and must be produced, was sort of lost.

So I think that's just absolutely so important to this project. But going to that question about contexts and the way one can engage these histories, I'm wondering, Connie, if you have some thoughts about, about this as a historian about how this project connects the history of the past, these movements

to contemporary education struggles. Before we talk about maybe a couple of them in more specifics, I just wanted to see what you might have to say about that relationship

as regards to the Revolutionary Papers Project. Well, I think it's really interesting that one of the things we did with this project is we didn't define anti-colonial as ending when there was flag independence, right? So if you look on the site, there are movement texts that have been produced in recent times. And in terms of education struggles, a few of those, for example, come from South Africa. Pathways to free education and public action were both produced out of the 2015 roads must fall, fees must fall student movement. in South Africa. And, you know, to bring together people interested in history and contemporary activism was a really

interesting part of the project. You know, we thought at first we would host a small workshop with people who are really deep history nerds going into these archives, collecting, finding these materials, but importantly, who were interested in its relationship to current organizing. And so in South Africa, you know, during the Rhodes Must Fall occupation of the administrative building at the University of Cape Town, for example, students had this occupation and in it started doing their own political education, right, and their own writing. So the writing subcommittee of RMF was one of the most important and strongest. And what you find is that when you collectively write, while in the midst of a frontline struggle, it also grows and supports and strengthens that struggle. So it's collective work and it's history writing in the moment.

And, you know, academia these days has become so siloed and NGOs and everywhere. It's the neoliberal way of doing things where you have people who are like, well, I'm a writer or I'm a researcher or I'm a teacher. or I'm a teacher, or I'm an activist, or I'm a frontline defender. Whereas with a lot of these movement publications, people were, you know, they were doing armed underground work. They were writing poetry. They were having, you know, these publications include minutes, for example, of meetings. So they are archives in and of themselves as well. They're curated, very carefully curated. So I often, wonder with this idea of a primary source versus the secondary source,

like things that were created out of movements in these journals were also theory and history writing. But then you have people who call themselves historians and going and writing the history and giving a narrative and then drawing selectively on these archives to back their arguments. And so it's really interesting to ask people in this project, not just about journals that have been forgotten. And these journals are often journals that came out of movements that were much more left than the liberation parties that became the rulers after, you know, in South Africa, it would be 94 or, you know, in Namibia would be 1990, for example.

These were movements that had often much more, much, much, more democratic practices, questions of, for example, I work with Asher Gamedze and Nashi Longue Shippway Mushanja on the Namibian Review. And the people involved in the Namibian Review were, had been part of starting Swapo, which became the liberation, kind of dominant liberation party in Namibia. They started Swapo and then they were kicked out of Swapo. And if you look at what they wanted to do in the Namibian review, they formed a group, a collective, with like a kind of manifesto opening editorial about how this group works. And their project was to publish this magazine. And they published it in exile in Sweden for many years. And then it was translocated back to what was South West Africa and became Namibia in the late 1970s and continued to produce this journal.

they wanted to create a platform for wide debate within the liberation movement. Debate that was about how do we actualize this anti-imperialist struggle, what Robin Kelly would call freedom dreams, right? And he writes about the way that these social movements had visions that are very difficult to, in a way, here now, especially visions that haven't yet won. And so I think that publishing what students, and solidarity allies in the student movement in South Africa in 2015 found is that the writing wasn't just to document, but it was an intervention and it was part of the movement building. And when I, for example, interview people who were involved in the circulation of magazines, how did they circulate and how were publics created and how did that then feed back into these journals?

because the journals were serialized. So it's very interesting. You see over time. So we could have chosen, for example, posters, which maybe we'll do or manifestos or something, but we chose journals because they were the social media of the time. And you can follow them over long periods of time. And so that means that there were editors, distributors, there were movements behind them. And they shifted.

And they were in conversation, both with people they were recruiting, people they were fighting against, but also crossing, you know, internationalist solidarity borders. And so you can read so much history in those journals, but a lot of it, you have to go and speak to people who are involved because a lot of it is not written in the journal. And so when we first put out a call for papers for this, what we thought would be a small workshop, we asked people about the journal that they were researching and the movement, but also where do you find them? How long did the thing run for? Where did it circulate? What was the political context? Because revolutionary or radical is contextual, what you might read, something that challenged where there were high risks, where there was

something at stake. And we wanted to know about that. And we wanted to know what do you think it's relevance to ongoing unfinished liberation is now. And so that brought together a very interesting, you know, group of people, as it were. And we now have a network of over 150 people working on these journals. And we thought we'd have a small workshop and it ended up being a really big conference. And from there we put out a call for papers for a special edition of Radical History Review, thinking how many are we going to really get? And we had over 90 really excellent submissions. And we had room for what ended up being about seven essays and seven or eight new teaching tools. And so one of the things we ended up doing, so I work on history in

Southern Africa, Mavish works on sociology and South Asia, et cetera, these regional and kind of cross-disciplinary approaches, and all of us work with movements, with contemporary movements, is that we thought, okay, let's find a space to be able to support some of these proposals that can't go into radical history review. So we partnered with Africa as a country, which is a, you know, everyone should go and look up Africa as a country. It's this incredible and insightful

news and media platform around contemporary issues across the continent. And so we partnered with them to do a series of papers from the African left. And so that so far 13 more papers have had this space. So it's a blog space. There's shorter articles. There's images of, for example, Saeed Hussein works on the analyst, which is a left Marxist journal from Nigeria. Nigeria is not very well known for having, you know, big left movements. And each of the Africa's country pieces,

similar to the teaching tools, is making an argument. We were saying to people, how do you work with this material? Because a colonial approach to archiving is let's collect all this stuff. Let's enclose it. Let's say we have the entire series of it. You know, we have the entirety and we control it and then, you know, maybe we digitalize it. And, you know, you see it, for example, with Namibia, you have human remains from Germany's first practice genocide in Namibia in 1910s. Now they're sending back skulls and human remains. They're sending back artwork from, you know, to Benin, et cetera. But what about the document? So, across the global north, you're sitting with these documents of movements from the global

south because of solidarity networks. But when you do end up finding those materials, do you put them up behind a paywall? Is it at a library? And so in that way, we were asking, what is an anti-colonial approach to archiving? And it's many things like Sara started to speak about but one of those things is that it has to be collaborative political work, not just here's scanning of all of these materials. And so in each Africa as a country article, you have people who are working on magazines that come from, you know, from Tanzania, from Namibia, from Ghana, from, but what are they asking and why and how? And so I think for us, that kind of education work is and that the kind of political and pedagogical practices of how do we share

this work isn't so that we just say now we have this archive or library that people can come to, but we actually want to talk to people who are doing that frontline engagement work and then put those into conversation. And I would just like to say that we'd love to see your curriculum on the spirit of Bundung. I've done work in the Bandung Archives and you know, how then do you, you know, what do you put on that kind of a syllabus and then how do you make those connections? So on our website, you can also search by decade or by theme so that you can look at the 60s or you can look at a specific term, socialism or whatnot. And how do you put these things kind of all onto a map and then people can engage them as per what issue they're facing now? Yeah, it's really terrific. And, you know, talking about all of these different resources, I have to say it's quite nice that we have this series with Africa as a country and the work that you've done with Ucumbosi Library and I'm flagging up Ucumbozi Library specifically because listeners will have noted that within the last couple of weeks, we have released episodes with people connected to the Ucumbozi Library. These episodes haven't come out at the time of recording this episode. But by the time,

this episode is released, those episodes will be out. So I know that you're familiar with both of the guests that we have coming on for those episodes. They're both related to the Mao uprising and those episodes are in our African Revolution and Decolonization series. So it's very nice to hear that you are familiar with the people who are also on the show talking about that, that uprising. Now, talking about one of the things that you brought up was posters. And I also have to mention before I transition us to another topic that we recently had an episode that was looking at Tri-Continental's underlying ecological analysis within their journal. And one of the big things that they had within these old journal pages was scans of

different posters that they were utilizing. And this was something that we talked about quite extensively with our guest for that episode, Alejandro Pedrigal. So listeners, you should definitely go back and listen to that episode and check out some of the images that we uploaded on our Instagram and Twitter account when that episode came out as kind of the episode images. They were posters from Tri-Continental, but it's really interesting thinking about the form in which we do this work and the form in which this work can take for political movements. So the fact that you brought up that posters might be another thing to look into

after journals is a very interesting idea. And then also the discussion regarding what revolutionary papers is producing in terms of the different kinds of material, the different kinds of uses, and also these partnerships. Things like Africa is a country are just different avenues to kind of facilitate this transfer of work and knowledge from. these revolutionary movements around the world to people who are actually intended to utilize this work in some way within movements today. So I'm wondering if maybe briefly we can talk a little bit about that point in terms of the form in which this work is done. And kind of maybe I know we've already talked about who the intended audience is, but perhaps there is some

discussion that can be had in terms of how we can expand that audience. audience that can benefit from the work that revolutionary papers is doing by exploring different forms in which this work is then produced. Can I actually just jump in here? Go ahead. I want to also take this opportunity when you're talking about audience to also express some self-criticism about revolutionary papers and the kind of things that we're doing. I mean, there's a lot of, like if we just start with digital teaching tools, you know,

I mean, we want obviously a huge set of readership or engagement with those digital teaching tools, but they're online, not everybody has access to even the Internet. Some of the, for example, the pamphlet that I worked on comes out of a region in Pakistan, which is regularly experiencing shutdowns of the Internet. So we are also constantly trying to think about, how do we expand access to these contextualized archives? So it's not just people who have, like, really broad, a great broadband in, like, our universities and our students at our classrooms that are reading them.

And we've been in conversation with you, Henry, about potentially thinking around putting out sort of downloadable PDF copies that can be circulated on WhatsApp, which is actually one of the primary ways that in Pakistan that a lot of things are read and engaged with, it's through WhatsApp conversations and PDFs of texts that get circulated, that people that read rather than something as fancy as our digital teaching tool. So, yeah, that's just sort of a short thing. I also wanted to sort of say, you know, as we've gone through this process, and I apologize if I'm diverging, but I was told I was allowed to go on a tangent.

You know, working with revolutionary purposes is also just three. up a lot of, a lot of questions for us. Like, okay, like, Adan asked earlier about, you know, these are not institutionalized canonized archives. And in many cases, like, Jabal, which is this underground pamphlet from the 70s that I worked on, to be two years to find it, and I had to convince some of the organizers involved in distributing it, and they didn't really want to share it with me at first. They're like, who are you? Why are you asking?

You know, so access to that required in existence. political relationship and trust with people before they handed it over. But also, that also, of course, reminds us that there are many pamphlets and many things that were written that are totally destroyed and that are not available to us, where recovery is not a possibility. And what does it mean that some things were saved and other things were not saved? Like, these are also questions of what is available to us. And there is a broader conversation around anti-colonial archives, around what are other

ways to write anti-colonial histories than through movement texts and pamphlets. Like, do you need to go to other forms, not just like posters, but like maybe Sara can speak more to this, but music and poetry and the arts and even, you know, like, how can you write, find alternative forms of archives? And we've also, you know, run into, I think, really asking ourselves, like, give each of none of these documents are, you know, while we're so excited about revolutionary. left to radical pavers, each of them had different kinds of limitations, I think, baked into them. Like, there were certain things they didn't see. Sometimes, obviously, not obviously, but often, you know, movement, anti-colonial left movements from the 70s tended to, like, put the quote-unquote woman question in second or tertiary in place. Not all of them. But there was various kinds of blind spots around what is revolutionary, what is left, what is counter-hegemonic

and conversations. And, you know, One big question I think that still comes up for us is where do we draw the line? Because, of course, there's also right-wing revolutionary movements that also were repressed as part of counter-revolutionary violence, but we're not including them. So, you know, these are all kind of questions that we're grappling with and they're live questions for us. But, yeah, I just kind of, I think I just sort of circle back and read to your question about intended audiences, I think. You know, the title for our introduction to the Africa is a country series, which the Africa is a country people actually articulated for us is the media of the usable past. And so a huge kind of audience is people organizing today, like thinking about political questions today and in the moment. The purpose of isn't just to look back at the past, but like how does it mobilize new ideas for how to reconstitute our political presence?

that's that's kind of and that's kind of a more vague audience one could say it's also to just kind of insert oneself in in current conversations insert alternative ideas that were buried and forgotten and then remember that even though they didn't win they can't actually be brought back and thought with again so I hope I didn't talk too long and no no that was so interesting actually you said something that connected back to something you'd said before in my mind which is you know about how to even classify these movements, you know, who to include, you know, under what auspices, because there are a lot of contradictions,

you know, in these movements. And, of course, discussing them and portraying them is not some kind of endorsement. It's an attempt to connect with a freedom dream of a kind, you know, and to, you know, see what can one learn from them, what can one take from them as well as what might one want not to reproduce about their practice. and so on. And it made me think a little bit about what you mentioned in your first remarks, which were that, you know, so many of our colleagues and apparent, you know, comrades who use decolonizing as a major frame of their analysis and their practice and all of that have been so silent when it comes to, you know, contemporary genocide, you know, taking place and and so on.

is that, you know, that this is a serious kind of question also about if one is to connect with and recognize and analyze from a solidaristic standpoint, contemporary movements, they don't often also fit with some of the older secular left frameworks. And I'm thinking in particular when one is doing work. related to the Middle East and Islamic world is a lot of counter-hegemonic movements take up a frame that isn't precisely secular. Often it is overtly religious. And something about that kind of spiritual connection and the values and the culture as we see, and this is something I myself want to talk a little bit more at some point and maybe write something on is just how important You know, some sense of spiritual commitment has been to Palestinian resilience and resistance and endurance during just an absolutely crushing, you know, a period of violence, but that nonetheless they are undefeated because of something both material but also just the resources emotionally that they've had to draw upon. And yet they would talk about it very much in a framework of religious language and of religious values and so on that doesn't always fit and certainly can come with quite a few, you know, conservative tendencies and so on.

And so is one to classify them within, you know, in a future revolutionary papers, you know, teaching module, how would you handle that? which ones are in it. You know, that raises lots of very interesting questions. So I don't have an answer for how one would do that, but I thought in your remarks, you gave a really wonderful sense of the contradictions and the complexity of such a project, which is the politics that we're all, you know,

anti-colonial archiving, that we would all have to wrestle with, anti-colonial history studying, anti-colonial imagining. These are the issues that we have to engage. So there's not really a question, but I just felt like, oh, what you said, they're really put together a few things that is what's so vital and vibrant about this project. And so it'll be very fascinating to see going forward because, as Coney mentioned, you know, the anti-colonial has not arrived. Oh, or the post-colonial has not arrived.

You know, there's different ways of understanding and framing that, but we obviously, you know, are still wrestling. with so many of these issues today. And I just really great example of what you just said. You know, this also comes across in our annotation, like our annotations are also not complete. Their work in progress.

And if you notice in the teaching till we say last updated rather than published on that date because we wanted to be a work in progress. And one thing that somebody pointed out, what does the teach tools we have is on the Bayanat of the First Intifada. So the sort of pamphlets that circulated and helped organize

the first intifada. And it had been, it's a wonderful thing. It's annotated. And then somebody, a Palestinian historian, a scholar and friend, Meznakato, who we really respect, was like, but you didn't annotate bismillah, bismillah, bismillah, which is at the top and is new for this, like, it's new in, I mean, I don't know as much as her, but like, is new for, for Palestinian resistance at this moment when they decided to introduce this kind of language, whereas before it's been, you know, PFLP and secular left. So there's also things that we're working through in annotations and also picking up with different kinds of things and different kinds of references. So also trying to shed ourselves of some of the assumptions that one may have about what constitutes revolution in politics.

Well, another great example. You know, I mean, in one of these modules, of course, you've got the Battle of Algiers and, you know, I mean, FLN, you know, it was not very much commented on. For years or decades, it seems to me, that some of those documents had a particular religious resonance, and they picked up on some religious language. It wasn't actually traditional. You know, I mean, it actually was sort of different. Like, for example, the wedding ceremony in, you know, the revolutionary wedding ceremony in the Battle of Algiers among a young man, a young woman who are part of the resistance, that's not exactly how a classic. Islamic legal niqa takes place. And yet, of course, it's clearly steeped in some kind of sense of religiosity and spiritual value. So in the past, I think people didn't actually comment on those things or really think about them that much because we had a sort of image of national anti-colonial liberation as essentially being a secular project. And if people had their religious commitments, that was one thing. But the language of the movement, the nature of its political goals and objectives had to really be. distinguished from that. And so I think there's so many examples that one would probably come through. So it's very interesting to know that this living practice of updates, it means that there's

an openness to finding new senses of meaning and new genealogies of forms of resistance expressing themselves in these, in these cultures and movements. So anyway, another comment in response, but we should find out a little bit more, perhaps, about your work on the project. You've had a chance to mention, I think, glancingly here and there, things that you've worked on, but I wondered if you wanted to profile

to give our listeners a sense of the texture, the full texture of some of the work that you've done on this. If you have any great examples, I think we would love to hear a little bit about them in the remaining time that we have if there's things that you'd like to highlight. Can I just jump in? And I'll try to highlight a few examples and also just continue this really interesting

and important conversation that we're having. And I think to my mind, yes, as Mavish said, these were like limitations of the project and of the digital teaching tools that we did have to confront and have to think about and that came up. And I also think that, you know, I think the kind of lesson, one of the lessons, from that was the importance of embedding these tools and embedding the work of the project consistently in communities and in contemporary current communities. So, and that's always produced sort of, that has been very generative, you know, and that has resisted that kind of museumizing,

you know, kind of archival kind of institutional archival impulse. So just a few, two or three examples that I can share from that is, well, one, at the workshop and the conference that we held in Cape Town, there were three teaching tools and presentations. Two of them were on Dawn, which was the magazine of Mkonto Visizwe, which is, you know, the militant wing of the ANC. But also it was an official organ of the ANC, which, you know, since then has also obviously, you know, created a more contested legacy because of the kind of reneging on promises of decolonization and kind of the disillusionment that the left has rightfully experienced right in that context. And that produced a really, because we were sitting in Cape Town and there were large numbers

of people of multiple generations present, you know, who are organizing now, who were active at that point. And the tool at that point and that kind of particular recovery of the archive created a dialogue now within the movement, within people who are active. So that's one way in which, you know, it's a reminder that it's good that they're on the website and people across the world can access them, but situating them in movement sites in communities, you know, whose histories they are actually excavating that is the work in a sense, and that that has proved generative. The other example I wanted to share is something that I worked on, which is, and, Adnan, this would be of interest to you because of your, you know, Bandam course as well, is that I developed a kind of an initiative called the Revolutionary Papers classroom in which, you know, there's a syllabus that builds on the teaching tools and there was a conscious attempt to actually teach with revolutionary papers, not as, you know, to kind of to unsettle that.

distinction that Kony also mentioned between secondary and primary literature. And this was a classroom in Lahore, in Pakistan, and, you know, so this is the text, they were kind of encouraged slash forced to look only at revolutionary Pakistani publications. And in the case of some students, it really produced very, you know, interesting and new intergenerational dialogue. So one of my students who was looking at a Soviet-backed left publication started talking to her. You know, she sought her father's help in reading the Urdu in that particular magazine because she, I mean, as with a lot of people who go through an English education in Pakistan, their Urdu isn't necessarily the greater. So she had to really, this was one of the

few moments that in which she needed to recruit her father or someone older did to help. And that's when she actually found out that he said, oh, this is a magazine I used to work with and work for when I was a college student. And it just became this kind of conduit for connecting with a family history of student radicalism and and kind of piecing together. You know, and this is, I mean, also this is the time period in Pakistan when we have a military dictatorship, you know, the 80s. So then it does become this kind of gap in history and gap in the way people and a big interruption and sort of disruption to left culture.

So it became this very, you know, kind of real material way for, you know, and working on that archive opened up that dialogue. So I think I remain hopeful of the kind of possible. of the tools and the project, as long as that process of consciously and deliberately embedding them in communities is also continued. And I mean, I haven't gotten around to it as yet, but I'm also hoping to kind of recreate that in the Philadelphia area, which has its own very, you know, long illustrious history of sort of anarchist and black radical organizing.

And the hope is that students here can then go out and do that kind of work here as well. Mavish, can you let us know about some of the work specifically that you've done for revolutionary papers? Yeah, I'd love to. So I want to focus on two things in particular. One is a collaboration which kicked off revolutionary papers with an archive in Pakistan, an archive of the library in Pakistan called the South Asian Research and Resource Archive. I will send the link through so that you can also share this. And Sara was also part of this project.

It was founded by a wonderful comrade and mentor, Ahmed Selim, who's also a Punjabi poet, a playwright, or journalist. Basically, those old type of left anti-clin, really left socialist communist comrades who had war, 20 different hats and wrote 100 books. He's really that type. He passed away in December 2023. And revolutionary papers worked with this. So it's kind of like Ucumbosi in Kenya. This is a library about now 40-minute drive now that there's a new highway outside of the capital Islamabad, and it houses 40,000 items on socialist and democratic histories in Pakistan. Fisherfolk movements, worker movements, peasant movements, communist party is people's personal diaries, et cetera. And Ahmed Salim, who's kind of this public intellectual

self-made archivist, decided a couple of decades ago that when he had a visit from somebody abroad that I should build an archive of left histories that are not canonized and institutionalized because of censorship in the National Library, et cetera. And so he built this amazing and wonderful archive, which is actually a touchpoint for anybody who does left history in Pakistan. And in fact, when I first shared the idea of Revolutionary Papers with Sara, we were both in a car heading up to this library. And what Revolutionary Papers did was our very first two digital teaching tools, which

was created by Sarah. And Sara can maybe also talk about this, a digital teaching tool. on a circular produced by the Muzdur Kisan Party or the Worker Peasids Party in the 1970s. And myself, which is Jabal, an underground pamphlin in the 1970s produced by an armed movement protesting the dismissal of a democratically elected provincial government in the southwestern province of Bologistan, a socialist-Marxist-Leninist movement, which I co-authored with another older comrade called Meir Mohamed Ali Talpur, who's still with us, thankfully. they both, you know, Jabal was partially from this.

There was a couple of copies I got from there and many copies I got from elsewhere. And Sarah's Muzdhkisan Party Circular was also from there. So many of the subsequent magazines and pamphlets that have come up out of Pakistan in particular, many people have, I believe, gotten some of them from this archive. and many people who write left histories.

Also in the future, we hope to put up more digital teaching tools that emerge from this archive. And I'm mentioning that because, again, like we've mentioned throughout this podcast, like collaborating with activists, organizers, archivist, public historians that are not ensconked within the academy necessarily, is a really, really key part of how we work. And the wonderful part when we developed the digital teaching tools and we launched it, Emmett Salim was part of that online launch. Like, I'd never thought that you could think about these pamphlets in this way, like contextualize them in this way, use them in this way.

So that was really wonderful. The other, yeah, so the other, I've just already mentioned, it was digital teaching tool that I worked on was called Jabal. And it came, as I mentioned, out of this armed movement, Marxist-Leninist movement out of Bologistan. And there's lots of things. People can go in and visit the digital teaching tool on the website, But just to bring attention to one really critical, I would say, counter-hegemonic concept that this pamphlet talks about, it talks about the concept of multinationalism.

And, you know, one of the things that have happened in many post-colonial contexts is as post-colonial states were formed, what was once a dream about a liberated future without. British Empire in this case, became very much post-colonial nightmares, as ideas about who constitutes the proper citizen of the state really became a very exclusionary definition. And in Pakistan, one of the ways that the idea of these sort of ideal Pakistani citizen has been exclusive has been an insistence on the Urdu language and insistence on a particular interpretation of Islam and also the dominance of certain ethnic groups in the military and in the elite. And what this particular pamphlet speaks about is the necessity of all of the margin.

It talks about the marginalized nations, minor nations, across Pakistan. And in Pakistan, it's the North Punjabis of a particular class in particular that are often seen as as dominant. They are then articulating it's necessary for us to have a multinationalist dispensation in Pakistan, which takes account of all the multiple languages and multiple cultures that make up the territory within which Pakistan is formed. And also, but at the same time, is critical of elites within each of these minor nations as well and also attends to the class question. So, you know, that's the kind of a conceptual political critical intervention and perhaps current debates. about Pakistan. So yeah, that's sort of, there, that's an example. I'll start talking.

No, that's marvelous. Unfortunately, Coney had to leave a little bit ago. And so we are not able to hear from her about a specific project that she worked on. Mavish, you're raising your hand. I see you. I'm going to speak a little bit, very briefly on behalf of Coney. She mentioned the Numidian review. Yes, exactly. That was what I was going to bring up as well. But you can surely. speak more to it than I can, so go ahead. Well, I don't know about, but as much as Connie, Mushanja and Asher Gamedze, who co-authored this digital teaching tool people can read about, but one of the really interesting concepts that emerges out of the Namibian Review, which I have learned a lot from, is a critique

of the, of a kind of soul authenticity, what they call soul authenticity. So there was a tendency in international solidarity efforts with the Ateaportite movements to identify just one political party formation or political formation as the sole representative of the anti-apartheid movement. In South Africa, it was the ANC, it was Swapo elsewhere.

And the Namibian Review actually critiques the tendency to reduce, you know, to just find one representative of the anti-apartheid movement or one political formation and instead talks about the necessity of being open to the many different tendencies within the anti-apartheid movement.

So I feel like as somebody who's not an expert in Southern Africa, that I learned that from that digital teaching tool. Yeah, absolutely. So a lot of terrific work going on at Revolutionary Papers. I'm very happy that we had the opportunity to have you each speak a little bit about some of the specific projects that you have had direct involvement in. But listeners, you should be sure to know that Revolutionary Papers has far more material available than what we were able to cover in this conversation.

So be sure to go to Revolutionary Papers.org Look through all of the material that's available there. Be sure to stay tuned for more updates from Africa as a country in collaboration with Revolutionary Papers and hopefully we will be able to continue collaborating alongside you as we go forward to continue highlighting the work that you are doing and hopefully even bring new forms of that work to people's attention.

So, again, our guests were Connie Benson, Mavish Ahmed, and Sarah Kazmi. Now, again, Connie is not here anymore, but Sarah and Mavish, is there anywhere that you would like to direct the listeners to define more of your individual works in addition to revolutionary papers more generally? Yeah, I mean, I've published a few, some of my research, which is on anti-colonial poetry and feminist poetry, which you can probably. find on, like, my page on my pen, like on the UPenn website. But more than that, I would maybe, you know, something people might enjoy. Find more tolerable is a page on Instagram, which is called Me Be Khaid, and maybe I could also maybe, Henry, maybe you could link to it. Send it to me in an email and I'll be sure to put it in the show notes for the listeners. Yeah. And then this is a space where I share.

sort of revolutionary songs and translations, and that might be something people would be interested in checking out. Yes, and for me, I think I've, you know, I definitely would encourage people to, of course, we've already mentioned a couple of times a revolutionary paper's website, the Africa's a country series, the Radical History Review issue, as some of the more alike,

some of the writings that we've done. Gosh, I would also encourage people to you know me, Hannah and Kony have all separately written about various aspects of this work.

So Hannah, Morganstern, for example, has written about Arab Marxist literary cultures and the creation of alternative literary infrastructures in the aftermath of the Nakhba. Connie Benson has written about alternative critical archival practices

and I've written about movement texts as anti-colonial theory. And this is kind of our academic writing. But each of us are also involved in different kinds of initiatives. So I've mentioned the library in Pakistan, founded by Ahmed Sadiq. I also myself was an editor and co-founder of a left Urdu English, English Urdu, rather, a magazine called Tengid, which means critique in Urdu, which ran between 2012 and 2017. I think our website might be down

but I'll send that to you as well because of course thankfully revolutionary you know serialized publications still exist in the form of Africa's a country Jamhur which is a South Asian left

website that Sarah sits the board of I believe and we know of many of them they're so important today and Thad Gid managed to survive for a few years before we had to shut out. Yeah, so that's a couple of examples.

Terrific. Again, this was a terrific conversation, and I highly recommend the listeners to check out Revolutionary Papers.org. But now is the time for me to turn it to my co-host, Adnan, to let the listeners know where they can find him, more of his work, and his newly titled show.

Yeah, well, firstly, I have to just thank our guests. What a wonderful conversation about a very important useful project. I just have to underscore. Everyone should go check it out and find ways to use it and to support it. You can follow me on Twitter. Yes, I still call it Twitter at Adnan A. Hussein. And as long as it's there, I will occasionally express my cantankerous views. But you can also check out the new show that Henry alluded to on YouTube. So it's video. At Adnan A. Hussein 786 is the sort of designation for the channel. And it's just, and you can also listen to it on audio. It's just called the Adnan Hussein show because I'm an uncreative person who couldn't think of a more interesting title. So do check it out and share and support it. We do a lot of similar stuff that we do here on guerrilla history, but also some other things and what I was alluding to about maybe thinking about spiritual values and Islamic liberation, or I would call it Muslim liberation theology, and its importance is

a sort of decolonial touchstone. I'll be talking about more those kinds of things and comparative religion and stuff like that. So if that's interesting to you, do you check out the channel? Absolutely highly recommend that. And surely, eventually, guerrilla history will also have some video component, but for now if you want to see Adnan's beautiful face, you have to go to the Adnan Hussein show on YouTube because we are not, as of yet, doing video for guerrilla history. But listeners, those of you who know me are probably happy that we don't do video at this point. You can find me on Twitter, though, at Huck 1995, H-U-C-1-995, and of course, it's much more advisable to just follow the show on the various social media.

platform. So on Twitter, Gorilla underscore Pod, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A-U-L-A-U-Score Pod, Instagram, Gorilla underscore History. And subscribe to our Substack. You'll get the updates of some recent things that we've been working for free to your email inbox, so you won't have to rely on social media algorithms. GorillaHistory.substack.com. Again, Gorilla is spelled with two R's. And last but not least, just remember that you have the ability to help support us and allow us to continue making episodes like this by going to Patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history again, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history. And on that note, and until next time, listeners, solidarity.

I'm going to be able to be. Thank you.