Abstract This research article delves into the historical intricacies of the anticolonial uprising and colonial repression that took place in August 1942 in Chimur to shed light on the sociopolitical factors that fueled this uprising against British colonial rule and ask why this event has been occluded in the dominant historiography of Indian decolonization. By offering a nuanced perspective on the Chimur Kranti, the article aims to contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of the multifaceted nature of the Indian independence movement, highlighting the regional variations and diverse dynamics that shaped this transformative period in history and questioning why this particular episode has been marginalized in popular and scholarly narratives of the Indian anti/decolonial struggle. In the context of the ongoing co-optation of the language of decolonization by right-wing forces in India to further their ideological aims, this article excavates the wealth of archival materials on the uprising and repression at Chimur to clarify its nature as a local instance of anticolonial struggle, which became imbued with an exceptional salience due to historically contingent factors: its extended temporality; the indifferent and escalatory responses of the British government; and the occurrence of systematic sexualized violence.

Abstract This article explores the political struggles of Central America’s Black and Indigenous peoples, particularly the Afro-Indigenous Garífuna and the Afro-Caribbean communities of Honduras in the 1950s and 1960s. Although these communities have not always articulated their struggles within the discourse of decolonization, their positionality as Black and Black-and-Indigenous subjects and their race- and class-conscious politics nonetheless represent decolonizing aspirations and strategies. Honduran mestizo nationalism has erased the country’s African and Indigenous heritage while exacerbating anti-Black racism and poverty. This article showcases this history of radicalism by highlighting the life and organizing work of Santos Centeno García, a communist, labor leader, and organic public intellectual. Facing poverty, racism, and displacement, he and other Black radicals took on the brave fight to organize militantly against US imperialism and racial capitalism on multiple fronts, including in labor unions, the Communist Party, and an antiracist organization called the Abraham Lincoln Cultural Society. Importantly, their struggles were both deeply rooted in centuries-long anticolonial practices and informed by the country’s radical working-class movements. Scholars of decolonization can learn from the Honduran case, in which freedom and justice were expressed in terms of race and class, even in a broadly race-blind society.

Abstract Post–World War II ushered in an era of rapid decolonization across the Global South; a period about which Ghanaian revolutionary Kwame Nkrumah exultantly wrote that European direct rule was “everywhere in retreat.” Still, those anticolonial victories were experienced unevenly across the decolonizing world, often undone by new forms of neocolonial exploitation, rising authoritarianism, and counterinsurgent violence. For many peoples, especially in spaces remade by settler colonialism and native dispossession, independence remained out of reach. As the hopefulness of Nkrumah’s era has long since waned, the reality of a world divided between well-fed and hungry has only become more sharply defined, and naked forms of colonial violence—as with the ongoing genocide in Palestine—continue to shape our political horizons. This introductory essay examines the urgency of this historical moment and the role of the historian in confronting contemporary colonial violence with new decolonial and emancipatory horizons.

Abstract This article analyzes the dynamics shaping the public memory of Valongo Wharf, a UNESCO World Heritage site linked to the transatlantic slave trade. The article explores how intersections between local, national, and international actors—including Black movements, intellectuals, and public officials—construct the site’s narrative. The memorialization process of Valongo Wharf is a contested space, reflecting both the recognition of historically silenced Black Brazilian memories and the potential pitfalls of domesticating Black culture within dominant ideologies. While the site celebrates African heritage and cultural expressions, it fails to fully leverage the memory of slavery as a tool to prevent the recurrence of racism in new forms. The federal administration’s neglect in installing an interpretation center further contributes to limited understandings of the site’s past and present significance. The article concludes by emphasizing the importance of recognizing power dynamics—who has a voice, access to resources, and control over narratives—in shaping the public memory of Valongo Wharf, thus reflecting broader issues of racial recognition in contemporary Brazil.

Abstract The recent boom in studies on colonial statues bears witness to the global “statue wars” waged in response to the unfinished business of decolonization and civil rights campaigns for racial and social justice. However, the focus of scholarship on iconoclasm and “fallism” has resulted in a relative absence of research into cases where fallism has failed in the face of grassroots campaigns to preserve colonial statues and monuments. This article helps to address this gap by exploring the aims and motives of the countercampaigners, the anti-fallists, who defended the reputation of British colonists in Africa and succeeded in preserving a memorial honoring their legacy: the Lendy Memorial in Sunbury-on-Thames. Using untapped original sources from the National Archives, the article exposes the controversial history behind the Lendy Memorial and argues that the key to the countercampaign’s success was to revive a gilded view of British imperialism by deliberately distorting and censoring historical evidence while tapping into nationalist rhetoric and public and political objections to progressive political and social activism, ridiculed as “woke.”

Abstract This essay examines two narrative quilts made in 2021 and 2022 by Black- and white-descendant communities in Alabama working together to memorialize names of enslaved persons drawn from previously un-transcribed antebellum Baptist church records, as well as from participants’ own recollections of enslaved persons associated with their families. The essay uses interviews to document the quilters’ experiences in sewing these quilts, describes the quilts’ construction and imagery, and argues that these works represent a quiet but powerful counter-memorial to the state’s ubiquitous stone and brass monuments to the Confederate dead. It maintains that a modest grassroots counter-memory movement in a forgotten rural area can be as compelling as large-scale urban projects such as the Equal Justice Initiative installations in Montgomery, which are beyond the capacity of most citizens to initiate, and suggests that the unique community that produced these works may itself constitute a living counter-monument that is even more extraordinary than the quilts.

Abstract Narratives of economic miracles have been structured by a story engine, or a source of tension capable of organizing the unfolding of a narrative over time in relation to context, protagonists, and outcome—in particular, the nature and scope of the social, economic, and political transformations engendered by the acceleration of economic growth. This essay explores the possible story engines of the economic miracle engineered by the military regime that governed Brazil from 1964 to 1985. It argues that the main narrative engine employed by the Brazilian government—the emergence of the state as a technocratic collector and allocator of finite resources—was supported by the global rise of the politics of scarcity cum politics of productivity after World War II. This narrative engine, however, sought to conceal the empirical engine of the milagre: the consolidation of forms of concentration that endorsed the authoritarian nature of the Brazilian developmental state.

Abstract This article puts inflation at the center of the making and unravelling of Brazil’s economic miracle, a period of high growth, low inflation, fast-paced industrialization, and rising consumerism between 1968 and 1973. This so-called miracle coincided with the most repressive phase of the twenty-one-year military dictatorship (1964–1985). The military regime took the credit for Brazil’s economic triumphs, weaving a narrative that democracy was bad for economic stability by blaming prior inflationary crises on profligate democratic governments and workers’ demands for higher wages. But after 1973, chronic inflation became an everyday mathematical and material hardship for Brazilian citizens—and headache for the policymakers and economists trying to forecast and freeze prices. Focusing on inflation trends and the cost-of-living crisis in Brazil from the 1960s to the 1990s, this article shows how the military’s miracle was never as solid as its supporters claimed. It argues that inflation is more than a metric for evaluating the country’s performance. Inflation became the target of seductive myths and heterodox policy experiments, as the miracle-makers tried to rewrite economic rules. Inflation also became a source of social conflict and political pressure, framing debates about social and economic justice as the country transitioned to democracy in the 1980s.

Abstract Periodicals played a key role in the making of left, anticolonial, and anti-imperial institutions, politics, and cultures in the global south. This issue of Radical History Review investigates how journals operated as a device for the creation and reproduction of counterhegemonic formations, often under conditions of extreme repression and neglect. This article builds on a multiyear project entitled Revolutionary Papers, as well as the contributions to this issue, to lay out the conceptual and political groundwork for examining these periodicals and introduce our collective commitment to mobilize them as part of political struggles today. The article expands the definition of the periodical, the revolutionary, and the global south and argues that these materials offer an alternate method for studying and practicing left anticolonialism. It proposes an analytical approach to periodicals that allows one to unpack the place of the journal in building left, anticolonial institutions, politics, and cultures, and opens up the possibility of mobilizing these journals as pedagogical material in education and movement contexts.

Abstract This teaching tool is based on Savera (Dawn), a left-wing literary periodical published quarterly on the Indian subcontinent from 1946 onward under the leadership of the Progressive Writers’ Movement. The tool foregrounds the genealogy of “critical realism,” a revolutionary form of Urdu realism that perpetuated the movement’s aim of bringing about social transformation in a former colony by critiquing India’s indigenous conceptions of class, gender, nationalism, language, and religion.