| FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Contact: Nitheesh Narayanan nitheesh@thetricontinental.org 11 February 2025 |
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| Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research releases a new dossier on the role that reading and popular literacy programmes played in twentieth-century revolutionary processes and beyond. |
| In the early twentieth century, peasants and workers led revolutionary movements in the poorer nations to overthrow the old regimes of landlordism. In these contexts, reading itself became a powerful tool for emancipation, as it empowered the masses to challenge authority and build egalitarian forms of being and belonging. This tradition continues today, from the library movement in Kerala (India) to Red Books Day celebrations across the world. Dossier no. 85, The Joy of Reading, looks at case studies in Mexico, China, and Kerala (India) to explore the different ways in which popular literacy programmes have sought to bring the joy of reading to the masses and keep alive the spirit of national liberation and revolutionary socialism. In each country, these programmes have taken different forms based on the particular historical and cultural contexts. For example, despite being primarily social democratic in nature, the mass literacy programmes that came out of the Mexican Revolution were still largely led and shaped by communists. In China, the initiatives implemented by the Communist Party of China (CPC) after the 1949 revolution managed to raise the adult literacy rate to 97%, one of the highest in the world. Finally, our dossier touches on Red Books Day (21 February), a project started in 2019 by left publishers in India to rescue collective life on a secular, cultural, and socialist basis that soon spread across the world. |
| Don’t miss our latest dossier, The Joy of Reading. |
| Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research is an international, movement-driven institution that carries out empirically based research guided by political movements. It seeks to bridge gaps in knowledge about the political economy and social hierarchy to facilitate the work of political movements and engage in the ‘battle of ideas’ to fight against bourgeois ideology, which has swept through intellectual institutions from the academy to the media. Our publications are produced in English, Spanish, Portuguese, and Hindi. Website: thetricontinental.org Facebook: facebook.com/thetricontinental Twitter: twitter.com/tri_continental Instagram: instagram.com/thetricontinental Media Contact: nitheesh@thetricontinental.org (Nitheesh Narayanan) |