Stand at the corner of Moema and Vilakazi streets in Orlando West, Soweto, South Africa. Twelve-year-old Hector Pieterson was shot here at half past nine on the morning of 16 June 1976 – half a century ago this month. Now look down. Near this spot, photographer Masana Samuel ‘Sam’ Nzima took six frames with a Pentax SL and a 50mm lens. The third became an image that travelled the world: eighteen-year-old Mbuyisa Makhubo running with Hector’s body, his sister Antoinette Sithole running alongside them. On the ground beneath them, a deep shadow falls across the asphalt. That shadow is evidence – recording the angle of the morning sun, the specific stretch of the Soweto road, the exact moment the apartheid state shot a schoolchild.

Hector Pieterson being carried by Mbuyisa Makhubo, 16 June 1976. Credit: Sam Nzima.

This image became an international symbol, endlessly reproduced as posters and silkscreened onto millions of T-shirts throughout the 1980s by the international anti-apartheid solidarity movement, from the Organization of Solidarity with the Peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America (OSPAAAL) in Havana and the Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM) in London to the Medu Art Ensemble in Gaborone, Botswana. Together, these groups made visible the brutalities of the apartheid regime and helped mobilise a global movement towards its defeat. This bulletin, however, is not about a single photograph but about a generation of photographers who documented apartheid, revealing its shadows, and the liberation struggle waged against it.

Photographing the Soweto Uprising

On 16 June 1976, between 3,000 and 10,000 schoolchildren marched in eleven columns toward Orlando Stadium. Their immediate grievance was the imposition of Afrikaans as the language of instruction in African schools, decreed without consultation. Their broader grievance was Bantu Education – or, as prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd had engineered it over two decades, a ‘separate and inferior’ system designed to teach Black children that there was no place for them beyond their labour. The Soweto Students’ Representative Council – led by nineteen-year-old Teboho ‘Tsietsi’ Mashinini, nineteen-year-old Murphy Morobe, and sixteen-year-old Seth Mazibuko – had resolved to start the march at Naledi High School on 13 June.

The first shots were fired at about 09:30. Fifteen-year-old Lesley ‘Hastings’ Ndlovu was the first child killed; Hector Pieterson was the second. By the end of the day, at least twenty-three were dead in Soweto, most of them students and young people; by the end of the year, more than 700 had been killed across the country.

Students kneeling on the floor to write, 1960s. Credit: Ernest Cole.

Alongside the students were the photographers. Sam Nzima worked for The World, the country’s most prominent Black newspaper at the time; Peter Magubane photographed for the Rand Daily Mail; and Alf Kumalo worked for the Sunday Times. They photographed. They were beaten. Some were arrested. They smuggled the negatives out through any channels available to them.

Kumalo, who lived in Soweto and chronicled the township for half a century, was persecuted by the same apartheid forces he was photographing. He recalled, ‘I was arrested, beaten up. They cracked my skull’.

It was not just photographers who bore witness to the atrocities that day in Soweto. Inside Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital, Dr. Malcolm Klein noticed that some of the casualties arrived with ‘strange wounds: small entrance holes in their upper bodies, with larger exit wounds lower down’. Doctors later realised that police had been firing from helicopters overhead. When the police demanded a list of every patient admitted with a bullet wound so that survivors could be prosecuted for ‘rioting’, the doctors and admission clerks refused. Instead, they recorded the reason for admission as ‘abscess’. ‘In this way’, Klein said, ‘we protected an unknown number of patients from being victimised twice by police brutality’.

The Camera Was My Gun

The cameras kept working after that morning and, over the decades, photography became more than a record of events: it became a practice of political education, collective memory, and resistance. ‘A struggle without documentation is not a struggle’, Peter Magubane recalled telling young protesters who refused to get their pictures taken that morning in Soweto. Magubane himself had spent 586 days in solitary confinement in 1969 for his photographic work, often hiding his camera in a hollowed-out Bible.

Funeral procession in Zwelitsha, King William’s Town (now Qonce), Eastern Cape, 1978. Credit: Peter Magubane.

Look at one of Magubane’s photographs, published in Soweto: The Fruit of Fear (1986): a bus packed with mourners, fists raised through the windows, more on the roof, a line of cars behind, open hills beyond. The year is 1978. The place is the Eastern Cape, the region of Steve Biko, a co-founder of the Black Consciousness Movement that inspired the Soweto Uprising. Biko had been killed in police custody the previous September. Here, Magubane documents a new political form under apartheid, in which funeral processions became substitutes for the meetings and marches that had been banned. In this context, cameras also took on a new meaning. As Magubane said, ‘I was able to carry my gun; the camera was my gun. I was able to kill apartheid with my gun’.

Look at another image, this time by Ernest Cole. A line of Black men, naked and facing a wall, hold up their arms as they undergo the medical examination of mineworkers under the apartheid migrant labour system. The same apparatus that classified those bodies had classified Cole’s: to obtain the passport that allowed him to leave South Africa with his negatives, he reclassified himself from Black to ‘Coloured’ and changed his surname from Kole to the more English-sounding Cole. The negatives he carried out – including the image of the mineworkers – were published in the United States in 1967 as the book House of Bondage. The book was banned at home. After the South African embassy refused to renew his passport, Cole spent years living on the streets. In 1990, one of South Africa’s greatest photographers died stateless in New York. His ashes were later returned to South Africa and buried in Mamelodi.

Night Cleaner Polishing the Boardroom Table, Johannesburg, 1984. Credit: Lesley Lawson.

Look at Lesley Lawson’s Working Women (1985). Lawson spent the early 1980s photographing Black women at work across South Africa, from domestic workers in white suburban kitchens and factory workers on production lines to agricultural labourers on white-owned farms. The book paired her photographs with the women’s own words on hours, pay, and the journey to work, giving a visual record to women whose labour underwrote the apartheid economy but was largely invisible in the media iconography of the decade. Lawson worked with the South African Committee for Higher Education (SACHED), which was the workers’ education trust, and Working Women functioned not only as a teaching tool for workers’ study groups, but also as a documentary record.

Look at Santu Mofokeng’s 1986 photographic series, Train Church. One image captures a carriage of the Soweto-Johannesburg commuter line at dawn: workers stand with hands raised, mid-song, while one man bangs against the train’s interior wall as if it were a drum. The commuter line – the daily mechanism of the apartheid economy that carried Black workers in and out of the white city before dawn and after dark – was transformed into a church, where mostly middle-aged women in work clothes sang, preached, and found solace. It was ‘a daily ritual’, as Mofokeng called it. Despite the dehumanising logic of the apartheid economy, Black workers were actively building the cultural and spiritual life that the system was designed to deny them. Mofokeng’s own commitment, he said, was to photograph ‘ordinary Black South Africans going about the day-to-day business of living’ – survival and collective life as resistance.

Hands in Worship, Johannesburg–Soweto Line from the series Train Church, 1986. Credit: Santu Mofokeng.

None of these photographers worked alone; all were embedded in this collective life, and many were involved in political organising. Omar Badsha, born into Durban’s Indian community in 1945, was a trade unionist before he became a photographer, serving as the first general secretary of the Chemical Workers’ Industrial Union. He bought his first camera in 1975 to document factory conditions and to teach workers’ classes. In 1981, Badsha helped initiate Afrapix, a collective of about forty women and men photographers that operated from the South African Council of Churches’ Khotso House in Johannesburg – raided and later bombed in 1986 – and maintained darkrooms in Durban and Cape Town.

A thread connecting all this photographic and political work was Black Consciousness, a movement and a set of ideas first articulated by Steve Biko. In the South African Students’ Organisation Policy Manifesto of 1973, Biko wrote that the Black Consciousness Movement ‘seeks to infuse the Black community with a new-found pride in themselves, their efforts, their value systems, their culture, their religion and their outlook to life’. The ‘Black man’ as defined by Biko was a political category, naming everyone the apartheid state had sorted into its non-white tiers – the African workers of the mines and the townships, the Coloured workers of the Cape factories and docks, the descendants of the Indian and Chinese indentured labourers Britain had shipped to cut sugar or work in the gold mines – and held them as one majority defined by their relation to white capital. For this reason, Biko stressed, ‘the importance of Black solidarity to the various segments of the Black community must not be understated’. The photography of the anti-apartheid movement was also about visibilising an entire colonial visual and racial order and building the solidarity to dismantle it.

Just a Little Atrocity Deep in the City

Fifty years later, more than three decades since the legal end of apartheid, the racial-capitalist system remains. The photograph of Hector Pieterson and the annual 16 June commemoration in Soweto continue to inspire new generations of youth in South Africa, across the continent, and throughout the diaspora in their own struggles for the unfinished work of liberation.

Youth in Diepsloot, Johannesburg, silhouetted against the night sky, 1970s. Credit: Alf Kumalo.

The struggle is not only South African. Since the US-backed Israeli genocide began in October 2023, more than two hundred Palestinian journalists – photographers among them – have been killed. Among those who have forced the world to keep seeing Gaza are Bisan Owda, whose daily social media videos from Gaza have reached tens of millions, and Wael Dahdouh, the Al Jazeera bureau chief who kept reporting after burying his son, cameraman Hamza Dahdouh, in January 2024. Alongside them are countless Palestinian photographers, journalists, and ordinary people documenting the destruction of their own world as it unfolds. Tricontinental’s dossier, Despite Everything: Cultural Resistance for a Free Palestine, traces the longer arc of Palestinian cultural workers documenting resistance since the Nakba, insisting that a struggle without documentation is no struggle.

As Miriam Makeba sang in ‘Soweto Blues’, the state tried to reduce the massacre to ‘just a little atrocity, deep in the city’. Fifty years later, the photographs, songs, testimonies, and archives of struggle continue to refuse that erasure:

The children got a letter from the master
It said: no more Xhosa, Sotho, no more Zulu
Refusing to comply, they sent an answer
That’s when the policemen came to the rescue
Children were flying, bullets, dying
The mothers screaming and crying
The fathers were working in the cities
The evening news brought out all the publicity:
Just a little atrocity, deep in the city

In solidarity,

Tings Chak

Art Director, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research

In Latin America, the paths of people’s struggles and the development of their cultures have always been intertwined. From Spanish and Portuguese colonisation in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to the independence struggles of the nineteenth century and the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, the peoples of Latin America have resisted successive forms of domination. José Martí, one of the leading figures in Cuba’s struggle for independence, gave this resistance one of its most powerful expressions in Nuestra América (Our America), his 1891 essay on the political and cultural unity of the continent.

For Martí, Nuestra América named not only a geography – the vast territory stretching ‘from the Rio Grande to the Strait of Magellan’ – but a civilisational project rooted in the histories, cultures, and struggles of the continent’s peoples. This was the anti-imperialist force of Martí’s reflection: Latin America could only free itself by knowing itself, by recognising the Indigenous, African, peasant, and popular roots that colonialism and sections of the intelligentsia had treated with contempt.

As Martí wrote in Nuestra América: ‘Solving a problem in full knowledge of its elements is easier than solving it without knowing them. … To know is to solve. To know the country and govern it in accordance with that knowledge is the only way to free it from tyranny’. Throughout its history, Latin American literature has been one of the principal means through which that self-knowledge has been produced. Through poetry, novels, essays, and song, the continent’s peoples have represented their realities not as abstractions but through lived experience.

Writers travelling by truck to Minas de Frío, Cuba, n.d. Source: Revista Casa de las Américas.

The second half of the twentieth century in Latin America was marked by profound political and social transformations. The Cuban Revolution of 1959 ruptured the island’s subordination to the United States and opened a process of socialist transformation that sought to remake economic, political, and cultural life, offering hope to peoples in struggle across the region. In response, the United States intensified its imperialist offensive: in Nuestra América, it backed the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961, supported the military coup in Brazil in 1964, worked to destabilise Salvador Allende’s government in Chile before the 1973 coup, and backed dictatorships and bloody counter-insurgency projects across the continent during the 1970s.

In this context, literature continued to play an important role in resistance, particularly during the Latin American literary boom of the 1960s and 1970s, when several writers gained international prominence. This period renewed longstanding debates on the relationship between art and politics, with Cuba – its revolution and cultural policy – at the centre of the discussion.

In the first year of the revolution, the revolutionary government created numerous cultural institutions, including the National Theatre, the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry (ICAIC), and Casa de las Américas. Directed by Haydée Santamaría, Casa de las Américas became an indispensable reference point for thinking about culture, art, and literature in Latin America. The Uruguayan writer Mario Benedetti (1920–2009) played a key role in deepening Casa’s political and cultural work, helping to establish literature as a terrain of resistance across Latin America. His own literary and political development, like that of many Latin American writers in the second half of the twentieth century, was also closely linked to Casa de las Américas.

Its journal, Revista Casa de las Américas, first published in 1960, played a central role in circulating and developing an emancipatory perspective on Latin American and Caribbean culture, contributing to the construction of a new society.

Alongside the creation of these institutions, Fidel Castro’s 1961 speech ‘Palabras a los intelectuales’ (Words to the Intellectuals) outlined the foundations of the revolution’s cultural policy. Initiatives such as the Conrado Benítez brigades, which were central to Cuba’s literacy campaign, and the free distribution of millions of copies of classical literature, formed part of this wider effort to make culture a right of the people. Notably, the first book published and distributed by the revolution was Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote.

However, the United States’ imperialist offensive against Cuba also extended into the cultural sphere. Seeking to counter Casa de las Américas’ growing influence, the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom launched the magazine Mundo Nuevo in Paris in 1966. Directed by the Uruguayan critic Emir Rodríguez Monegal, Mundo Nuevo presented itself as an independent literary journal while working to draw writers of the Latin American boom away from Cuba’s revolutionary cultural project and into the orbit of liberal anti-communism.

As revolution and counter-revolution clashed across the continent, writers took different positions on both the construction of socialism in Cuba and the cultural offensive waged by the United States during the Cold War. Prominent authors of the Latin American boom – such as Julio Cortázar, Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel García Márquez, and Carlos Fuentes – entered this debate in distinct and sometimes contradictory ways, revealing that literature and art could not be separated from the wider political struggles of the period.

It is in this context that Benedetti’s formulation on the role of the writer in the class struggle is especially important. In a 1968 interview with Cuba magazine, following the Cultural Congress of Havana, Benedetti argued:

If the duty of every revolutionary is to make the revolution, the duty of every writer, as such, is to make literature … literature, among other functions, expands the horizons of human beings. To the extent that the people can grasp the meanings – whether ultimate or intermediate – of great works of fiction, they come closer to our struggle, and even more so if they are capable of analysing the alienation imposed upon them by the enemy. For this reason, we see no need to impose on militant writers a narrow thematic or generic line.

Thus, the potential of literature goes beyond the political position of the writer, although in moments of increased imperialist aggression, taking such positions remains crucial in strengthening or weakening political processes. Benedetti’s point was that the revolutionary force of literature cannot be reduced to a prescribed theme, genre, or slogan. Literature can widen the horizons of the people, sharpen their capacity to recognise alienation, and bring them closer to struggle precisely through its formal, imaginative, and emotional power.

Culture Is Not a Luxury but a Right

Mario Benedetti was one of the most important Latin American writers of the twentieth century. Across poetry, novels, short stories, and essays, the Uruguayan author developed a direct and profoundly human style that captured the social and emotional complexities of Uruguay and of Latin America more broadly.

Beyond his literary importance, Benedetti played a central role in the cultural and political life of the Latin American left. His involvement with Casa de las Américas – first as a juror for its literary prize and later as founder and director of the Centre for Literary Research – contributed to the development of a Latin American literary culture that, while recognising European literary traditions, emphasised the political, aesthetic, and cultural significance of Nuestra América. This experience deepened his reflection on literary practice in dialogue with Latin American readers and revolutionary processes, without reducing literature to rigid formulas or dogmas. His reflections on the role of intellectuals and cultural workers in revolutionary processes remain particularly significant.

At the 1968 Cultural Congress of Havana, Benedetti addressed the tensions between intellectuals and activists. At a time when armed struggle was a principal form of political struggle, intellectuals and artists were often called to join the front lines. For Benedetti, intellectual activity was itself a necessary part of revolutionary development. The intellectual, he argued, is ‘almost by definition [a] nonconformist, a critic of their social environment, a witness with an implacable memory’.

He also insisted that culture is not a luxury but a right: ‘The artist who defends their right to dream, to create beauty, to create imagination, with the same determination and conviction with which they defend their right to eat, to have a roof, and to care for their health – that artist will be the only one capable of demonstrating that their work is not a luxury but a necessity, not only for themselves but also for others’.

For Benedetti, then, revolutionary culture could not be treated as secondary to political struggle. Art, literature, and imagination were part of what made it possible for people to interpret their conditions, defend their dignity, and struggle for a new society.

Benedetti on the jury of the Casa de las Américas Award, with Haydée Santamaría and Alejo Carpentier, 1978. Source: Fundación Mario Benedetti.

Poetry constitutes the largest part of Benedetti’s work. Across his work, he explored a wide range of forms, including the haiku later in life, using them to illuminate the richness of ordinary experience. His poetry, like much of his writing, is marked above all by an ethic of proximity and solidarity, as seen in one of his haiku:

His prose also became a defining part of his literary contribution. Across more than nine collections, he addressed themes such as memory, life under dictatorship in Uruguay, love, and the intimate textures of daily existence, giving political density to seemingly intimate experiences. Short story collections such as Montevideanos (Montevideans), Geografías (Geographies), and Buzón de tiempo (Mailbox of Time), alongside the novel Primavera con una esquina rota (Springtime in a Broken Mirror), show how the affective and the political are inseparable in his writing.

Benedetti’s life and work reflect a militant engagement with culture and art as fundamental dimensions of revolutionary construction. His poetry and prose are both subtle and profound, bringing to light the contradictions of building a new human being in a new society.

Why Do We Sing?

The dynamics of class struggle in the twenty-first century remain intense. The declining US empire has intensified its offensive against the territories and peoples of the Global South, from Palestine to Venezuela to Cuba, and those peoples continue to resist. The ‘battle of ideas and emotions’, as Fidel described it, has become increasingly central in our time.

Mario Benedetti’s legacy – both as a writer and a militant – is essential for understanding how intellectuals can act not only as cultural workers but also as organisers within revolutionary processes. Casa de las Américas continues to be one of the most important cultural institutions in Nuestra América, promoting artistic production rooted in the experiences of our peoples and keeping alive the conviction that culture is not separate from political struggle but one of its necessary forms.

At a time when the United States intensifies its attempts to suffocate Cuba through blockade, sanctions, and isolation, solidarity from people’s organisations is essential to keeping the flame of the Cuban Revolution alive so that present and future generations may continue the struggle. As Benedetti’s poem asks, ‘Why do we sing?’:

Warmly,

Miguel Yoshida

Member of the Art and Culture Department and the Nuestra América office at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research; editor at Expressão Popular, Brazil.

On the forested path leading to Chibichiri Cave in southern Okinawa, small stone figures stand among the roots of banyan trees. Hip-high and solitary, their heads are slightly bowed, with hands folded in prayer. Moss and lichen have begun to claim them, as if the forest were slowly absorbing them into itself. Coming out of the cave, I noticed the figures more clearly than I had on my way in. They seemed to stand as silent witnesses or guardians, placed there to remember the dead and to warn the living. But what are they warning us against?

Sculptures by Kinjo Minoru at Chibichiri Cave.

On 2 April 1945, the day after US forces landed on Okinawa, approximately 140 civilians – mostly elders, women, and children – hid in this cave. More than eighty of them were driven to suicide after the Imperial Japanese Army told them that the approaching US soldiers were ‘red devils’ who would rape and torture anyone they captured. As subjects of the Emperor Hirohito, surrender was not an option – death was preferable to the shame of being taken alive. In a neighbouring cave, however, everyone survived because two people who had lived in Hawai’i and could communicate with the US soldiers hid there. It was the Japanese army’s suppression of truth and dissemination of lies that took the lives of those in Chibichiri Cave. For the next three decades, none of the surviving villagers spoke of this tragedy, which continues to haunt the community to this day.

Walking from the caves to the surrounding village of Yomitan, I was greeted by a towering statue that rose above the quiet village road – a woman with her right arm outstretched towards the sky and her head raised, as if resisting the violence descending upon her. With her left arm, she holds four young children close to her body. At her feet, I encountered the same solitary stone figures, standing among the gravel and weeds like a procession. They guided us along a path to a courtyard, where we were met by large relief sculptures and an elderly white-bearded man seated in a plastic garden chair.

We Are Ryukyuan, Never Japanese

Entrance to Kinjo Minoru’s workshop.

Kinjo Minoru (金城実) is eighty-six years old. Born in 1939 on the small island of Hamahiga, Kinjo lost his father in 1944 during the Second World War – or the World Anti-Fascist War – before he had the chance to know him. Kinjo has spent decades building a monumental body of sculptural work that tells the haunting stories of Okinawa before, during, and after the 1945 Battle of Okinawa, one of the bloodiest campaigns of the Pacific war. The works are made of concrete, plaster, and metal armature – the same construction materials used daily at Henoko to build yet another US military base. Kinjo uses them to reclaim what those bases were built to make people forget. The surfaces of his work are rough, porous, and unfinished, not because the artist lacks refinement but because the history his work carries is itself still unfinished, raw, and contested.

In the open-air gallery in Kinjo’s workshop, you encounter relief panels that stand about a story tall. Almost life-size figures of civilians, soldiers, mothers, and children emerge from the wall in high relief, leaning toward you as if to tell their story. They are a material metaphor for what Kinjo understands as his people’s condition: embedded within a history they did not choose, pushing against it, not yet liberated from it.

Kinjo guides us through the panels himself, pointing with his wooden cane, narrating each scene.

Kinjo Minoru with his art etched into Chibichiri Cave.

‘Why would a mother kill her own daughter?’ Kinjo asks, standing before a panel in which the bodies of women and children are intertwined so tightly that it is impossible to tell who is protecting whom and who is killing whom. He continues, ‘Why would a brother kill his younger brother? You should ask that question. Why did it happen only here in Okinawa, not in mainland Japan?’.

His answer cuts to the colonial root. For over five hundred years, the Ryukyu Kingdom governed these islands as an independent state with its own languages, cultures, religions, and diplomatic relations – trading across East and Southeast Asia, maintaining tributary ties with China, and developing a civilisation distinct from Japan’s. In 1879, the Meiji government forcibly annexed the kingdom, deposed its last king Shō Tai, and remade the islands as Okinawa Prefecture, the southernmost, poorest, and most expendable territory of a rapidly industrialising empire. What followed was systematic cultural suppression designed to erase Ryukyuan identity and produce loyal imperial subjects.

The Meiji government installed a new governor, Matsuda Michiyuki, and brought in educators from mainland Japan to remake Okinawa’s schools as instruments of imperial assimilation. However, the Meiji government refused to establish universities in Okinawa despite establishing them in every other prefecture. ‘Why?’ Kinjo asks. ‘To control us’. The mass suicides at Chibichiri were not aberrations – they were the logical outcome of a colonial education that had spent decades teaching Okinawans to die for an emperor who had never treated them as equals. ‘We are Ryukyuan’, Kinjo defiantly tells me. ‘I am never Japanese’.

Despite this harrowing history, some Japanese politicians today claim there was no military coercion behind the mass suicides in Okinawa, while others deny Japan’s wartime atrocities, including the Nanjing Massacre that took 300,000 Chinese lives in mere weeks. Kinjo’s sculptures stand as memory and material refutation: a rough and heavy history that resists being smoothed over.

An Island That Cannot Be Swallowed

Detail of Kinjo Minoru’s artwork.

Today, Okinawa makes up just 0.6% of Japan’s landmass, yet it hosts roughly 70% of all US military facilities in the country. Seeing the prefecture firsthand, one quickly realises that this is not a matter of isolated bases; it is a permanent military occupation of everyday life. Fences cut off coastlines, fighter jets shatter the soundwaves, and entire communities are hemmed in by infrastructure built for war.

The same island, sacrificed as a battlefield in 1945, is being prepared as a frontline once again, with China painted as the ‘devil’ in a New Cold War. There are new missile deployments, evacuation plans are being drawn up, joint US-Japanese military exercises are underway, and a new US military base is actively being built in the Okinawan village of Henoko. This is all despite three decades of majority opposition from Okinawans, expressed through referendums and daily protests led by elders of the affected communities and organised in grassroots movements including No More Battle of Okinawa, which hosted Tricontinental’s visit.

Despite the brave instances of resistance, Kinjo watches this occupation with the impatience of someone who has seen too much patience. ‘Okinawan people are too quiet, too gentle’, he told me during our visit. ‘They should get angrier. If [the US and Japanese militaries] want to use Okinawa, they should treat us like human beings’. But he does not despair. ‘As [long] as I live, it may be difficult, but the next generation – I’m sure they will stand up for resistance’.

‘Okinawa is small’, Kinjo said. ‘But you cannot swallow a needle’.

From Okinawa’s Caves to Chongqing’s Bunkers

Kinjo Minoru’s artwork depicting the bombing of Chongqing.

One panel in Kinjo’s workshop deserves special attention: it was made in collaboration with artists from Chongqing, China, who travelled to Okinawa to work alongside him. During the World Anti-Fascist War, the Japanese military subjected Chongqing to years of strategic bombing, particularly between 1938 and 1943, killing thousands and driving the population into caves and bunkers carved into the city’s hillsides. Two peoples on opposite sides of the same imperial war, both sheltering in caves, create art together eight decades later.

The resonance deepens when Kinjo shares a remarkable story that connects both peoples’ histories of resistance. In October 1962, at the height of the October Crisis of 1962 (known in the West as the Cuban Missile Crisis), US Air Force crews in Okinawa received orders to launch thirty-two nuclear-armed Mace B cruise missiles at targets across Asia including Beijing, where I live. The launch officers on the ground questioned the order and refused to proceed. That the artists of Chongqing and the sculptor of Okinawa now build something together – hands shaping the same concrete, carving the same history from two sides – is not merely symbolic. It is a living refusal of the war that nearly destroyed them both, and of the New Cold War that threatens to do so again.

Don’t Cry – Study Your Own History

Kinjo Minoru’s artwork about the Battle of Okinawa.

Kinjo’s parents married at eighteen. After his father was killed in the war, his mother never remarried. She cried every year on 23 June, Okinawa Memorial Day. One year, Kinjo told her, ‘Don’t cry. I am not sad my father died. It was a time like that. Everyone suffered. One out of four was killed in the Okinawa war. This is not a day for crying. It is a day to study your own history: Okinawan history’.

This is what Kinjo Minoru has done with his life. Transforming mourning and anger into sculpture – pressing the forms of the dead into concrete so that the living cannot pretend they were never there. His workshop is not a bourgeois gallery. The sculptures sit in the open air, weathering like the island itself, visited by students, international guests, and old friends who come to see his work and hear his stories.

But the question is no longer only about 1945. Kinjo clearly sees what is happening now. Seventy per cent of Okinawa’s young people, he notes, do not know what Japan did across Asia during the war – in China, in Korea, in Southeast Asia. ‘Maybe they wouldn’t support the prime minister’, he says, ‘and the media talks about China as a threat’. The same machinery that once convinced Okinawan mothers to kill their own children – militarised education, manufactured fear, and the suppression of historical knowledge – is being reassembled today around the ‘threat’ of China. Okinawa, once again, is being prepared as the sacrifice zone. But Okinawans like Kinjo continue to remember – and resist.

Warmly,

Tings Chak

Art Director, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research

PS: Join us on 30 April, the 51st anniversary of Vietnam Liberation Day, for a webinar to launch ‘Hands Off Asia!’, the International Peoples’ Assembly campaign against US militarism across the region.

Listen to ‘Vivas y Furiosas’ (Alive and Furious) by Sudor Marika featuring Tita Print. Over the cumbia sounds that drift through working-class neighbourhoods in Argentina, ‘Vivas y Furiosas’ gives voice to feminist resistance.

March is a month in motion. In Argentina, 8 March (8M) – International Working Women’s Day – gets people on their feet and into the streets, painting the city squares and avenues in feminist and internationalist purple. Then, on 24 March, the Día Nacional de la Memoria por la Verdad y la Justicia (National Day of Memory for Truth and Justice) brings together organisations, political parties, students, and families to commemorate the victims of Argentina’s US-backed civic-military dictatorship (1976–1983) and to affirm ‘Nunca Más’ (Never Again), the enduring rallying cry of the country’s human rights movement against the crimes of the dictatorship. Under Milei, that struggle has renewed urgency as attacks on workers’ rights are paired with official denialist propaganda around 24 March. As Feminismo Gráfico (Graphic Feminism), a cultural collective born in Argentina that seeks to disseminate comics from transfeminist perspectives, we too belong to these struggles.

The circulation of culture and art is full of myths, obfuscations, and hidden marvels. 8M offers an opportunity to showcase the discussions and practices advanced by militant cultural spaces. On the terrain of comics, Feminismo Gráfico’s digital archive, Nosotras Contamos (literally, ‘We Tell Stories’, but also ‘We Count’ or ‘We Matter’), seeks to contribute to this effort. It is the space where Feminismo Gráfico compiles, disseminates, and recovers the names of women, trans, and non-binary creators in Argentina, from the early twentieth century to the present. In honour of 8M, we begin a new update to the archive, adding contemporary creators and recovering overlooked figures from the past. In doing so, the archive foregrounds Argentina’s feminist stories and comics, and with them a brilliant history of struggle and creation that is often rendered invisible.

Jules Mamone, cover of the original Nosotras Contamos catalogue, 2019.

A Sea of Comic Panels and Cheap Paper

Let’s first situate comics within the field of cultural production: from satirical cartoons and newspaper strips to longer graphic narratives, they are an artistic language loved by working people yet long treated as inferior to ‘higher’ forms of art. They emerged in the heart of cheap, mass-produced periodicals. From the beginning, they made room for humour and satire, imagined possible futures, and turned monsters into vehicles for metaphor. They also have the incredible power of telling stories to those who are learning to read. Throughout the history of people’s struggles, comics have carried expressions of resistance across their pages in the form of fiction, journalistic chronicles, and poetic experiments.

Since the medium’s inception, Argentina has produced a rich body of comics and even managed to sustain popular magazines that fearlessly competed with those emerging from the Global North. Many authors were persecuted or their works banned, especially during the dictatorship. Héctor Germán Oesterheld, writer of the landmark Argentine science-fiction comic El Eternauta (The Eternaut, 1957– 1959), was among those targeted in that era. An author, editor, and militant in the Montoneros – a left-wing Peronist guerrilla organisation primarily active in the 1970s – Oesterheld was disappeared by the dictatorship as part of Operation Condor.

This month marks fifty years since that coup in Argentina that sought to take from us far more than our stories and storytellers. Since then, the changes wrought by the violent imposition of neoliberalism in this country have had a profound impact on our comics industry. But we never stopped drawing, whether in magazines, fanzines, books published by editorial cooperatives, or webcomics. And in all these spaces, women creators were present.

Signing as ‘Cerebella’ or ‘Cotta’, the popular Argentine chef Blanca Cotta published her cartoons in the satirical magazine Tía Vicenta (Aunt Vicenta). These two pieces were published in 1957.

The Myth of Absence

One tool of power is invisibilisation. If something goes unnamed, it eventually ceases to exist. We cannot build something when we are constantly starting from zero. What remains is an eternal reverberation of struggles stripped of memory, narratives buried, so that building resistance feels like raising walls on sand.

When it comes to the place of women and gender dissidents in comics, tired questions and prevailing myths reappear. The myth of absence is the first that must be shattered, because there have always been women comics creators. In Argentina, when women cartoonists and comics artists are discussed, perhaps only two or three are named even though there are more than a hundred. In fact, the Nosotras Contamos Digital Archive spans nearly a century.

The archive was created by Mariela Acevedo, feminist militant, researcher, editor, and comics scriptwriter. Drawing on her militant experience, she turned a furious curiosity into a collective project, setting out to find all those who had gone unnamed. She sought to contribute to that sense that ‘there are so many of us’, using feminist genealogy as a research method and acting on the contagious conviction that we must respond with information, wit, and militancy to the casual assertions that sustain machista common sense. The group that was assembled over this contagious spirit continues the project today.

By speaking with collectors, interviewing creators, and rummaging through libraries, we discovered that one should always leave room for doubt when someone says ‘this woman is the first to…’ We began to find that, behind ambiguous pseudonyms and abbreviated signatures, many women comics artists had long been assumed to be men. Looking at signatures on certain panels and reading a ‘G.’ before ‘Dester’, one might imagine a ‘Gonzalo’ or a ‘Gilberto’, but never a ‘Gisela’. Yet it was Gisela Dester who drew and signed pages of Ticonderoga, scripted by the disappeared compañero (comrade) behind El Eternauta. We also found that behind the work of male creators stood the women in their families who sustained the household and the care work that made their creative labour possible – including sisters or wives who anonymously helped finish pages to meet deadlines.

It might seem like a basic task – finding and naming these artists – but through those encounters a genealogy comes into view, making visible how the patriarchal system seeps into every facet of life. Those making a place for themselves in the field today might not know that in the 1970s Martha Barnes, one of the first women to work professionally in Argentine comics, worked at Columba, one of the country’s most important comics publishers. Yet she was consistently paid less than her male peers and assigned to romance stories, even though she wanted to draw horror. Knowing our history and building collective memory is essential.

From a popular feminist perspective, this is nothing new: care work is not recognised as work, feminised labour is rendered invisible, and women’s active roles in the history of masculinised fields are concealed. But outside feminist spaces, these forms of erasure are still poorly understood. The distortion deepens in the cultural field, where it remains necessary to insist that those who produce art are, in fact, part of the working class.

It is also nothing new that, over the years, women and sex-gender dissidents have elbowed their way into the industry, figuratively or literally. Whether creating new spaces or occupying and transforming established ones, the presence of women creators in comics today is undeniable. It is in this spirit that we often call ourselves okupas (squatters) – partly in jest, but more so as a provocation. Because as soon as this okupación (occupation) starts to become visible, we are labelled as ‘too many’.

Feminismo Gráfico exhibition at the Feria de Editores, Buenos Aires, 2025. Photo: Cé, Archivo Intangible.

The Myth of Style and Subject

Another myth layered onto absence or exception is the myth of a homogeneous style or aesthetic attributed to a certain gender. It is assumed that women, trans, and non-binary creators only engage with certain themes, that they draw in certain ways, or simply that they ‘can’t draw’. It is especially brutal when judgement is disguised as a compliment: ‘Weird… you draw like a man’. As if hand and mind were mysteriously connected to one’s gender when one picks up a pencil and a piece of paper.

When we began to compile comics for the Nosotras Contamos archive, we found classical styles, bold lines, formal experiments, glimpses of fine art, and fanzine aesthetics. In short: we found everything – unbridled.

In narrative terms, all kinds of worlds emerged as well: horror, science fiction, political chronicles, autobiographies, experimental narratives, and humour. If there was a common thread, it was a commitment to representing what the mainstream industry tended to leave out. We found diverse bodies, skin tones usually rendered invisible, identities, and political demands that emerged sometimes explicitly, sometimes more obliquely. The archive proposed thematic axes, drawing connections that transcended time and linked the concerns of a mid-twentieth-century creator with those of a young one just starting out today. This was one more way of collectivising, of thinking of ourselves as part of something larger that unites us with those who came before, those who share these spaces today, and those who will come after us.

Diana Raznovich (drawings) and Lucrecia Oller (texts). Manual de instrucciones para mujeres golpeadas (Instruction Manual for Battered Women), Argentina, 1989. Works created for Lugar de Mujer, a key feminist collective in the 1980s. Donated to Feminismo Gráfico and made available for free public access.

To Break Myths, We Organise and (Re)Present Ourselves

Nosotras Contamos is alive and growing. We know it can never be complete. Its expansion must also form part of an internationalist cultural network. There are sister projects in the region, including Chile’s Mujeres Chilenas en la historieta (Chilean Women in Comics) catalogue, and in Europe, such as Presentes (Present). We are always looking for other projects engaged in documenting and historicising comics and graphic narrative, especially in the Global South.

The Feminismo Gráfico archive is a genealogy with gaps – missing pieces we have not yet managed to recover. We know that much labour remains invisible, that many collaborations continue to be poorly documented, and that many works still bear no signature. We also know that the field continues to grow, including through emerging creators working in new media whose contributions cannot yet be fully mapped. For this reason, we carry the words of our compañera Mariela like a banner made of comic panels: ‘We tell this story: it is incomplete and unfinished, but it is collective and seeks to make visible what is missing, so we can reconstruct in some way, imagine it, write it, and make it present’.

This month’s dossier, The Anti-Feminist Agenda of the Latin American Far Right, features artwork selected in collaboration with the digital archive. To explore the ever-expanding collection, visit feminismografico.com. We tell stories with the hope that, the next time someone reads a comic, they might imagine something other than a man’s name behind every signed initial.

Warmly,

Dani Ruggeri

Designer, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
Co-coordinator, Feminismo Gráfico

Valeria Reynoso, excerpt from the fanzine Sé vos (Be Yourself), Editorial In Bocca al Lupo, 2017. The phrase is a direct quote from Lohana Berkins, an Argentine travesti-trans activist and founder of Asociación de Travestis, Transexuales y Transgéneros de Argentina (Argentinian Association of Travestis, Transsexuals, and Transgenders People, ATTTA), who was also a leading advocate of Argentina’s Gender Identity Law of 2012 (Law 26.743).

Listen to ‘Plantar para Colher e Alimentar: Tem Muita Terra Sem Gente, Tem Muita Gente Sem Terra’.

‘The word “culture” comes from agriculture’, Patrícia Lafalce, Carnaval director of Acadêmicos do Tatuapé, a samba school in São Paulo’s working-class eastern zone, told me. We spoke in the artistic director’s office, where singers, dancers, and musicians were busily preparing for a rehearsal ahead of Carnaval week. Downstairs, hundreds of community members were already eagerly gathering, dressed in the school’s colours – blue, white, and a lot of glitter.

Photo credit: Priscilla Ramos of the MST.

More than a linguistic definition, her observation is a materialist one – that culture, at its roots, is about the production and reproduction of life, from cultivating the land to nourishing our bodies and spirits to the formation of new human beings. On 13 February, the first day of Carnaval, Acadêmicos do Tatuapé paraded through São Paulo’s Sambódromo do Anhembi to a samba-enredo (Carnaval theme song) titled ‘Plantar para Colher e Alimentar: Tem Muita Terra Sem Gente, Tem Muita Gente Sem Terra’ (Plant to Harvest and Feed: There Is So Much Land Without People, and So Many People Without Land). Created in collaboration with the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (Landless Workers’ Movement, MST), one of the world’s largest social movements, the song emerges at a significant moment: as the MST approaches its fifth decade of struggle for popular agrarian reform, Brazil continues to confront extreme land concentration upheld by the country’s right-wing forces, large landowners, and agribusiness.

Roughly 2,000 singers, dancers, musicians, and community members marched with Acadêmicos do Tatuapé, dressed in fantasias (elaborate Carnaval costumes) and riding atop carros alegóricos (towering ornate floats), propelled by the thunder of the bateria (the school’s percussion ensemble). Alongside them was an entire ala (wing) of more than sixty militantes – movement organisers – and peasant families from MST encampments and settlements. In the audience were hundreds more, wearing the emblematic MST cap, specially made for Carnaval in Acadêmicos do Tatuapé colours and glitter. On it was written, ‘Plantar para colher e alimentar’ (Plant to harvest and feed), carrying their message from the settlements to the streets of São Paulo and onto the national airwaves, where Brazil’s massive popular spectacle – watched by some 45 million television viewers – became a stage for the struggle for agrarian reform.

Samba as a Voice of the Marginalised

Photo credit: Priscilla Ramos.

Though Carnaval today is a commercialised billion-dollar industry, its roots – and those of samba – can be traced to urban working-class communities and struggles. The first samba schools emerged in Rio de Janeiro in the late 1920s, though the genre itself can be traced to the living rooms of people like Tia Ciata (Aunt Ciata, 1854–1924), an Afro-Brazilian community leader credited with nurturing samba’s emergence by hosting musicians and composers in her home in Rio de Janeiro’s Pequena África (Little Africa) neighbourhood, a historic community that that was home to many Africans after the 1831 ban on the transatlantic slave trade.

These schools were community organisations made up largely of the descendants of formerly enslaved Africans from Angola and Congo who migrated from rural plantations to the urban peripheries after abolition in 1888. They carried with them not only their labour but also their music, religious practices, and forms of communal self-organisation and mutual aid. Samba was born from these migrations and has maintained its race and class origins, as well as its connection to rural life and forms of collective organisation.

Photo credit: Priscilla Ramos.

By foregrounding the land question in this year’s Carnaval, the samba-enredo created by Acadêmicos do Tatuapé and the MST harkens back to the origin of the genre itself and builds on samba’s legacy of connecting the city to the countryside’s concerns and struggles. ‘We need to eat every day’, Lafalce says. ‘Where does that food come from? Brazil has so much land – if you plant, anything grows’. This question underscores a central contradiction of Brazilian society: despite the country’s vast agricultural wealth and land, many Brazilians still go hungry, and many peasants remain landless. In 2019–2020, Brazil returned to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation ‘hunger map’, which tracks chronic undernourishment. ‘It is unthinkable’, Lafalce said, referring to the more than 30 million people pushed into severe food insecurity during the presidency of right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro (2019–2022) due to austerity policies, the dismantling of social programmes, and the economic impact of the poorly managed COVID-19 pandemic.

‘Our conception of popular agrarian reform is precisely about connecting the countryside and the city’, Carla Loop of the MST’s Culture Collective told me. For the MST, agrarian reform must include confronting where food comes from, especially in cities, as well as the environmental destruction driving climate catastrophe and the violence that expels rural families into precarious urban existence. Loop argues that samba songs like the MST’s collaboration with Acadêmicos do Tatuapé can ‘invite urban society to reflect on consumption and the social relations behind it’. The seed of this collaboration was planted in an evocative phrase that the MST has amplified in its urban solidarity work, ‘Se o campo não planta, a cidade não janta’ (If the countryside doesn’t plant, the city doesn’t eat).

With Every Hoe Raised, Freedom Blossomed

Photo credit: Priscilla Ramos.

Acadêmicos do Tatuapé has historically uplifted political themes in its Carnaval songs. ‘That is precisely the point’, Loop explains; ‘It allowed us to burst the bubble’. Through this collaboration, the MST and Acadêmicos do Tatuapé brought popular agrarian reform into communities beyond their usual base while centring ‘trans people, gay people, Black people, white people, sanitation workers, doctors, businesspeople, artists, people from encampments and settlements – everyone together’.

However, creating the ‘democratic space’ that Lafalce described and taking a clear political position also had consequences. In a country where agribusiness wields enormous political and media power, collaborating openly with the MST – a movement that challenges the plantation model through land reform and agroecology – made Acadêmicos do Tatuapé a target. The school faced internal disagreements and external pressures, including threats of delayed public funding to other financial repercussions. Yet the community held firm, choosing the MST collaboration out of twenty-one submissions through an internal vote in which each department participated.

‘Plantar para Colher e Alimentar’ fuses two entries and unites eighteen composers into a single voice. That voice sings the history of the land in Brazil, beginning with creation and the sacred origins of cultivation, then turning to the colonial violence that followed:

Carried by the samba-enredo, the parade advances like a moving mural. Each ala has its own colours, gestures, and costumes, and together they ‘illustrate’ the song’s chapters as they pass, punctuated by the carros alegóricos that bring the metaphor to life. The song traces the peoples – Indigenous, African, migrant – who built Brazil and cultivated its land, from the colonial extraction of sugar, coffee, and cotton to the primary contradiction facing the country today: ‘Mas a ganância por terra sem gente / Faz muita gente sem terra chorar!’ (The greed for land without people makes so many landless people weep). The bateria’s pulse pushes the school forward, and the chorus of thousands carries the refrain down the avenue as each wing passes. The Acadêmicos do Tatuapé-MST collaboration shows agribusiness, with its pesticides and deforestation – despite the industry’s slogan ‘agro is pop, agro is tech, agro is everything’ – for what it is: destruction dressed as progress.

And then comes the turn. In a samba school parade, the bateria can drop into a sudden break, a held breath that spotlights a line before the drums surge back in. The porta-bandeira (flag-bearer) and her mestre-sala (partner) – performing a ceremonial duet at the heart of the school’s presentation – lead into the MST’s answer: agroecological production of organic rice and cacao, and sementes crioulas (heirloom seeds) preserved against corporate monoculture. The song continues, ‘Mãos calejadas no cultivo da semente /… Floresce da terra a fé dessa gente’ (Calloused hands cultivate the seeds / and from the earth, the faith of these people blossoms). The final float, the Festa da Partilha (Feast of Sharing), presents an MST settlement, a vision of collective production. The song continues, ‘Viver é partilhar e nada em troca esperar!’ (To live is to share and expect nothing in return!).

Joy as a Form of Struggle

Photo credit: Priscilla Ramos.

The samba parade was part of a rigorous competition between thirty-two samba schools in the Liga Independente das Escolas de Samba de São Paulo (League of Independent Samba Schools of São Paulo). Each school is scored based on enredo (theme), samba-enredo, harmony, parade movement, bateria, porta-bandeira and mestre-sala, lead group, carros alegóricos and other scenic elements, fantasias, and overall unity. This major annual production is a pillar of Brazil’s mass popular culture, and the MST is not shying away from it. While the movement has a long history of organising in samba and Carnaval – from participating in other parades to creating its own samba school, Unidos da Lona Preta (United of the Black Tarp, named for the black tarp tents used in MST encampments during land occupations) – the collaboration with Acadêmicos do Tatuapé brought that cultural work to a new level.

‘It is a great demonstration of the construction of cultural hegemony’, Loop told me. ‘An entire community sings the project of popular agrarian reform and transforms it into art – more than 2,000 people involved during an entire year’. She highlights the capacity of the Brazilian people, and across Latin America, to transform pain into music, fantasy, and irony that ‘remains in collective memory’. After all, as Loop insists, ‘The struggle is not made only through suffering. Joy is also a form of struggle’.

In Other News…

21 February marked Red Books Day, the anniversary of the first publication of Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto (1848). For this year’s Red Books Day, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and the International Union of Left Publishers created a calendar to honour Fidel Castro on the 100th anniversary of his birth and the 60th anniversary of the Tricontinental Conference in Havana. It brings together original works by twelve international cultural workers, all inspired by the concept of the ‘Battle of Ideas.’ Please download it, share it, and organise an exhibition of the artworks featured in the spirit of Fidel Castro’s internationalism and the enduring Cuban Revolution.

Warmly,

Tings Chak
Art Director, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research

Notes

Listen to ‘March for the Beloved’ (임을 위한 행진곡), written in 1981 by activist lyricist Paik Ki-wan.

Leaving behind no love nor honour, not even names
Only a burning oath sworn to the end of our lives.
Comrades are gone, but our flag alone still flies.
Let us not tremble until the new day arrives.
Years pass, but the land remembers
That heated cry of awakening:
As we lead the way, let the living follow!

– ‘March for the Beloved’ (임을 위한 행진곡, 1981)

On 1 November 2025, protesters gathered across South Korea and chanted ‘No King: Trump is not welcome!’. These rallies were organised in response to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meeting in Gyeongju, which took place from 31 October to 1 November. On the sidelines of this meeting, Donald Trump confirmed that he would impose tariffs on South Korea that would result in the extortion of $350 billion, a plan that he had announced earlier that year. This was yet another example of his administration’s ‘America First’ agenda which subordinates the sovereignty of nations across the world, but particularly in the Global South. As the APEC meeting took place in Gyeongju, hundreds gathered nearby at the People’s Summit to read and sign the Gyeongju People’s Declaration, a statement calling for an economy for all, not just for the few.

Hong Song-dam, May-27 Daedong Sesang (A World of Great Unity), 1984.

Before the summit began, the crowd took a moment of silence to pay their respects to the martyrs killed during the 1980 Gwangju Uprising, a student-led protest against the military rule of Chun Doo-hwan (1980–1988) that ended in a violent massacre, and then sang ‘March for the Beloved’. Written in 1981 by activist lyricist Paik Ki-wan to honour those massacred in the Gwangju Uprising the year before, the song has become an anthem of Korean social movements. This practice of honouring martyrs by singing together, an example of minjung-uirye (민중의례, or ‘pledge of the people’), began as a conscious refusal by South Korean activists to pledge allegiance to the national flag during Chun’s military dictatorship.

During my time in Korea for the People’s Summit, I sought to understand the role of a similar tradition, minjung-gayo (민중가요, ‘people’s songs’), in Korean political movements today. This genre of Korean protest music emerged during the struggles against the military dictatorships that ruled South Korea from 1961 to 1988, before and during Chun’s regime, and continues to be used by social movements today.

This bulletin draws from conversations I had with members of art collectives like Maru (마루), which performed at the summit rally, and the recently formed feminist singing group norae-pae I-eum (이음, ‘connection’ or ‘bonding’), a part of the Seoul Women’s Association (서울여성회) that fights for gender equality. What emerged through my conversations was a picture of the living radical tradition of minjung-gayo undergoing a quiet revival and even intersecting in new ways with gender and with the heavily commercialised K-pop industry to advance the people’s message today.

A People’s Music Against Dictatorship and for Reunification

A mobilisation during the People’s Summit in Gyeongju, where protestors sang ‘March of the Beloved’ (right).

Minjung-gayo distinguishes songs created for and by the people from daejung-gayo (대중가요), or mainstream popular music. During the military dictatorship era, creating minjung-gayo was dangerous. In 1971, for instance, the military junta banned pioneer Kim Min-gi’s (김민기) song ‘Morning Dew’ (아침 이슬). Yet people found ways to access the song, and it became one of the most beloved anthems of the democratisation movement which continues to be played at protests today.

According to the Maru collective’s Kang Hyo-jun (강효준), though minjung-gayo had already emerged as a genre, it ‘boomed’ after the Great Workers’ Struggle of 1987, when over three million workers launched strikes that finally forced democratic reforms in South Korea. ‘A lot of new songs were being written [during this time]’, Kang explained.

For many in the minjung movement of the 1970s and 1980s, the struggle for democracy was inseparable from long-standing demands for national reunification and liberation, from the partition of Korea in 1945 to the devastation caused by the imperialist Korean War that began in the 1950s and the permanent presence that the US established in South Korea in 1957. Songs like ‘Our Wish Is Reunification’ (우리의 소원), which was originally composed by Ahn Byung-won in 1947 with lyrics by his father, Ahn Suk-ju, gave voice to the longing for the reunification of Korea. Other songs drew on Indigenous musical traditions such as pansori (판소리), a genre of musical storytelling, and gut (굿) shamanic rhythms, reclaiming cultural traditions that had survived colonisation and mobilising them as resources for contemporary struggles.

Very few new songs have been written in recent decades, however, a trend that mirrors the weakening of South Korea’s progressive movement itself. ‘The people’s art movement could not help but follow that decline’, Kang reflected. Collectives such as Maru work to keep the tradition of minjung-gayo alive: as Kang told me, ‘we must… keep writing new songs, expand our solidarity, and listen to the people’s stories to turn those stories into even more new songs’. Maru’s vision aims to broaden their social movement base through music that represents people’s struggles today. ‘When a revolutionary moment comes and when a new world comes,’ he expressed, ‘it will be our songs that will be sung’.

Similarly, the Seoul Women’s Association’s singing group norae-pae I-eum seeks to create minjung-gayo that are representative of people’s struggles, including resistance to patriarchy. Kim Jee Un (김지은), the association’s director and a leader of its singing group, recalled how their first performance in early 2025 deeply moved their audience, ‘because when they thought of minjung-gayo, they often thought of only men singing’. The group intentionally uplifts protest music written by women about women’s struggles, since there are very few songs like this – and ‘some are written by men with sexist content’, Kim explained. Beyond expanding minjung-gayo’s role in women’s liberation, Korean activists today have also reimagined the genre’s relationship to mainstream music like K-pop to condemn political violence and attract new members to their struggle.

K-Pop for Impeachment

A mobilisation on 6 December in anticipation of Yoon Suk-Yeol’s impeachment vote the following week. Credit: International Strategy Center.

We are singing; we will get better.
We remember the days foolishly wasted away.
Still, isn’t it good?
Even through a river of tears
We are here together.
Isn’t it funny?
If we had been sitting around crying
We would have never met in this world.

– ‘Isn’t That Good?’ (좋지 아니한가), 2022 cover by YUDABINBAND (YdBB).

On 3 December 2024, right-wing President Yoon Suk-Yeol declared martial law allegedly to ‘safeguard constitutional order and national stability’ against ‘anti-state elements’, including supposed pro-North Korean forces undermining the government. His declaration of martial law triggered massive protests and encampments in Seoul, despite the freezing winter nights. Within two weeks, Yoon was impeached by the National Assembly. The movement that ultimately toppled him grew from the 2016–2017 candlelight protests against Park Geun-hye, a far-right leader and the daughter of former military dictator Park Chung-hee. Both movements deployed a remarkably hybrid musical arsenal.

In addition to traditional minjung-gayo songs performed at rallies, organisers incorporated the popular genre K-pop into their mobilising strategy. For instance, K-pop songs were played during the 2016–2017 protests, interspersed between political speeches and slogans. One such song is Girls’ Generation’s ‘Into the New World’ (다시 만난 세계), its lyrics about a general sense of ‘not giving up’ reinterpreted as a vision of collective liberation from the right-wing regime.

Kim described the commotion this caused among long-time activists who complained that K-pop music and light sticks (popular accessories that fans take to K-pop concerts) were ‘ruining the tradition’. Yet she maintained that a movement is about the people: if K-pop played a role in encouraging young people to return week after week, it should have a place in the struggle.

Once Again, Forward! 또 다시 앞으로!

Members of Maru (left) and norae-pae I-eum (right). Credit: Maru and Seoul Women’s Association.

Those bitter years, those filthy, fearful days.
Again, let’s rise above them
And march to the rhythm of history.
One! Two! Three!
Forward! Once again, forward!

– ‘Once Again, Forward!’ (또 다시 앞으로)

Solidarity action with Venezuela, 10 January 2026. Credit: International Strategy Center.

The same Korean movements that mobilised against Trump’s visit during APEC have now called for an International People’s Action Denouncing One Year of the Trump Regime. This declaration condemns the Trump administration’s imperialist violence across the world, from backing and funding the ongoing genocide in Palestine to the recent bombing of Caracas, Venezuela, and kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Deputy Cilia Flores, on 3 January 2026 (you can find a poster here, created by the International Peoples’ Assembly – one image among many to be help up at Venezuela solidarity rallies across the world). Ultimately, people’s movements from Korea to Venezuela remind us that the struggle continues, and so do its songs.

Warmly,

Tings Chak

Art Director, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research

Listen to ‘Santo José Gregorio’ by Daniel Santos.

If you enter a typical Venezuelan home, you’ll likely encounter a portrait or small statue of a distinctive, slender man in a black suit and hat, with a neat moustache, hands clasped behind his back, and a candle glowing beside him. Known affectionately as ‘The Doctor of the Poor’ and ‘The People’s Saint’, Saint José Gregorio Hernández (1864–1919) is not only a figure of Catholic devotion but one of the most recognisable images in Venezuelan popular culture, especially among the working class, who have long turned to him for healing and protection. In recent years, and particularly amid the Trump administration’s escalated attacks on Venezuela, this popular saint has taken on a new meaning.

Over a century after his death, Hernández’s canonisation by the Vatican on 19 October 2025 coincided with a new wave of imperialist aggression against Venezuela. In March 2025, the Trump administration invoked the Alien Enemies Act to target supposed members of Tren de Aragua as ‘alien enemies’, alleging – without presenting any evidence – that Venezuelan migrants in the United States had ties to the gang. Earlier that same month, around 250 Venezuelan migrants were deported to Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s Terrorism Confinement Centre (CECOT), a mega-prison condemned by human rights organisations for its concentration-camp-like conditions. Then, in late August 2025, the US began amassing the largest military deployment in the Caribbean since the October Crisis of 1962 (known in the West as the Cuban Missile Crisis). In the months since, the US has carried out a series of illegal strikes on small boats in waters off Venezuela that have killed more than eighty people. In this context, many Venezuelans have further embraced Saint José Gregorio as a symbol of their country’s steadfast capacity to overcome these great challenges.

Though he was not an artist, the significance of Saint José Gregorio for us lies in how a people under siege have made a religious figure into a symbol of popular devotion and national resistance. Today, representations of Saint José Gregorio are no longer confined to churches and the homes of devotees but appear on murals and billboards across the country and in the prints and figurines sold by street vendors, weaving his image into everyday life.

A Life in Service of the People

Sculpture by Francisco Narváez in honour of Saint José Gregorio Hernández, Central University of Venezuela, 1950.

José Gregorio Hernández Cisneros was born in 1864 in the small town of Isnotú, nestled in the Venezuelan Andes, just as the country was emerging from the devastation of the Federal War and refounding itself as the United States of Venezuela under a fragile federal constitution. One of seven children, he was the son of a pharmaceutical and livestock salesman and a housekeeper. From a young age, Hernández demonstrated exceptional intellectual promise. By the time he graduated as a medical doctor in 1888 – in the early years of the liberal modernising project that followed the long dictatorship of Antonio Guzmán Blanco – he had mastered English, French, Portuguese, German, and Italian, and had a working knowledge of Hebrew. Hernández had also studied philosophy, music, and theology at a time when the Venezuelan state was expanding secular education while negotiating its fraught relationship with the Catholic Church.

After graduating in 1888, Hernández briefly practised in Caracas, sharing a small room in La Pastora that served at once as bedroom, surgery, and even a makeshift tailor’s shop, and often giving his own meals to the neighbourhood’s poor. When his mentor, Dr Santos Dominici, offered to help him set up a proper consulting room in the capital, Hernández refused, saying that he wished to return to his native Isnotú. ‘One day, my own mother asked me to return to alleviate the pains of the humble peoples of our land. Now that I am a doctor, I realise that my place is there amongst my own’, Hernández told Dr Dominici. That August, he undertook the long, uncomfortable journey back to the Andes – travelling by boat from La Guaira along the coast and through Curaçao, across Lake Maracaibo to La Ceiba, then by mule into the interior – to work as a rural doctor. In letters from this period, he described caring for patients suffering from dysentery, asthma, tuberculosis, and rheumatism and struggling against the deeply entrenched superstitions that complicated people’s trust in medical treatment.

Hernández’s exceptional skill as a doctor and dedication to the people did not go unnoticed. While he was still searching for a place to establish his practice in the Andes, a decree by President Juan Pablo Rojas Paúl created the new Vargas Hospital in Caracas and authorised the state to send a young Venezuelan doctor of ‘good conduct and recognised aptitude’ to Paris to study the latest experimental sciences – microscopy, bacteriology, histology, and experimental physiology – and then return to modernise medical education at home. Hernández was chosen for this mission. In 1889 he travelled to France and worked in the laboratory of the eminent histologist Mathias Duval. Hernández returned home, bringing some of the first microscopes to the country, and became one of the pioneers of modern scientific medicine in Venezuela, especially in the fields of bacteriology and histology.

Alongside his scientific achievements, Hernández twice sought to join the priesthood, in 1908 and again in 1912. However, his own frail health kept him from completing his studies both times. He continued practising medicine, gaining widespread fame in Caracas for his selfless care for the poor, often covering the cost of his patients’ treatment himself. He also played a critical role tending to patients when the devastating Spanish flu pandemic ravaged the country in 1918, which claimed over 25,000 lives (around one per cent of the population).

On 29 June 1919, Hernández died tragically after being struck by a car. His life of selfless service and religious devotion, combined with his sudden death, immediately transformed him into a people’s saint whose significance for popular religion soon transcended Venezuela’s borders. Long before the Vatican deemed him a saint, the people had already canonised Saint José Gregorio.

The Splendour of Being

Palmira Correa, José Gregorio Hernández, n.d.

While primarily a physician, Saint José Gregorio also engaged with philosophy, developing a profoundly humanistic view of art that refused to separate beauty from ethics. In a society marked by liberal oligarchic power, latifundista (landowning) culture, and the uneven advance of capitalism, he treated aesthetics not as escape but as a question of how human dignity is defended and enlarged.

For Saint José Gregorio, beauty was the ‘esplendor del ser’ (splendour of being), which can only be given material form through actions oriented toward the good. In other words, beauty – as ethics – is not only something to behold but something to do in the world.

In 1912 he wrote the prose essay ‘Visión de arte’ (Vision of Art), which culminates in the narrator’s exalted reaction to a scene in which Christ performs the Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes. The essay was originally published alongside a reproduction of Arturo Michelena’s monumental La multiplicación de los panes y los peces (The Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes, 1897), painted for the Basílica Menor de Santa Capilla in Caracas. In Michelena’s work, the miracle unfolds amid a gathering storm by the water, framed by palm trees, as people distribute food among themselves while Christ stands at the centre. This image grounds Hernández’s aesthetic ideal not in detached classical theory, but in the highest form of divine compassion and justice extended to those in need. Read through his understanding of aesthetic beauty as ethical action, the scene becomes an argument for social justice as splendour: beauty is realised when the hungry are fed, scarcity is answered by shared provision, and compassion takes material form among ordinary people. Splendour, then, is not confined to the canvas or the chapel. It is realised in acts of collective dignity – often forged amid turbulence, when the demand for it becomes most urgent.

A People’s Saint in Art and Culture

Mural of Saint José Gregorio Hernández by artist @hamktrazos, 2025. Photo: Daniel Hernández García.

The veneration of Hernández was, from the beginning, a grassroots phenomenon. While the intellectual elite also mourned his passing, it was the artisans, industrial workers, small business owners, and domestic workers who, in gratitude for his service and in awe of his piety, transformed him into a popular saint.

Newspapers reported that at his 1919 burial the crowds were so large that they prevented the motorcade from reaching the cemetery in Caracas. Some people insisted on carrying his coffin themselves, while others dropped flowers from their balconies as humble offerings. Tributes at his grave quickly turned into pilgrimages, with people travelling long distances to his grave site seeking improved health through his intercession. Belief in his power to perform miracles spread rapidly – stories of prayers answered and of dreams in which he appeared performing intricate medical operations on the sick. By the 1970s, the sheer number of candles burning near his tomb posed a fire hazard, and in 1975 his remains were moved to a church in central Caracas.

Hernández’s status as a popular saint was so immense that it transcended institutional opposition. In 1957, renowned Puerto Rican nationalist and singer Daniel Santos, known as a voice of the Caribbean working class, recorded the bolero ‘Santo José Gregorio’. In response, the Catholic Church pressured the dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez to ban the song in Venezuela because the Vatican had not yet approved Hernández’s canonisation. Yet the song continued to circulate, a reminder that popular devotion and culture move faster than ecclesiastical approval.

Moreover, Hernández was incorporated into Venezuela’s largest popular spiritual movement, the syncretic devotion to María Lionza. He became a figure in one of the movement’s spiritual ‘courts’ – revered groups of spirits recognised for specific attributes – and was especially venerated for his healing. In neighbouring countries like Colombia, there is even a self-proclaimed congregation of gregorianos (followers of José Gregorio) who perform rituals in his name. These associations with spiritism and the esoteric world delayed his formal recognition by the Church. In October, President Nicolás Maduro even publicly criticised Church authorities, including Venezuelan Cardinal Baltazar Porras, for trying to obstruct the process. In the end, however, popular fervour prevailed.

Today, as imperialist aggression has intensified against Venezuela, Saint José Gregorio has arguably become one of the most represented figures in Venezuelan popular art, second only to the national hero Simón Bolívar. Weeks before he was canonised, hundreds of murals, graffiti, and sculptures of Hernández appeared throughout the country. Countless everyday artists and artisans created images of him, alongside works by famous sculptors and painters like Francisco Narváez, Marisol Escobar, and Alirio Palacios, further cementing his place in the national consciousness. Once a religious symbol of solidarity with the poor and the sick, Saint José Gregorio has become an expression of national pride, unity, and a people’s stubborn insistence on their own dignity in the face of imperialist aggression.

A Saint in Times of Peace and War

Left: Rosana Silva, Goyito Miliciano, 2025; Right: Giuliano Salvatore, José Gregorio Hernández, 2024.

Saint José Gregorio is often regarded as a man of peace, a notion fuelled not only by his pious life but also by the fact that his death coincided with the signing of the Treaty of Versailles on 28 June 1919, which ended World War I. Among his devotees, this coincidence is not accidental but providential: many believe that he consciously offered his life as an act of intercession to bring the war to an end. However, the saint’s actions during his life reveal not only a commitment to peace but also a profound commitment to national sovereignty. In 1902, when Britain, Germany, and Italy imposed a naval blockade on Venezuela to demand payment for foreign debt – an early example of the sort of gunboat diplomacy we are seeing today – President Cipriano Castro called on all citizens to unite and defend the homeland. According to historian Miguel Yaber, Saint José Gregorio was the first man to enlist for the militias in his local recruitment office, answering the call to take up arms to defend his country.

Perhaps today – as Venezuela once again faces an imperialist siege, with over eight million Venezuelans voluntarily joining the popular militias to defend the nation’s sovereignty – Saint José Gregorio still has a message for his people: sometimes we must fight to defend life and guarantee peace. The same image that once stood for quiet devotion now looks out from barrio walls and banners as a collective declaration that the Venezuelan people will not surrender.

Carlos Ron
Co-coordinator of Tricontinental Nuestra América

Listen to ‘Ya Habib’ by the Palestinian band Darbet Shams, which includes the lyrics, ‘Come back, you will be safe. Don’t believe them and don’t be afraid. We will build our homeland’.

On 29 November 1947, the United Nations General Assembly adopted Resolution 181, which set the stage for the Nakba, an act of ethnic cleansing that seized 78% of Palestinian land, destroyed more than five hundred towns and villages, displaced more than half of the population, and led to the creation of the State of Israel. Seventy-eight years later, the struggle for liberation persists as Israel’s escalated genocide continues to devastate Palestinian life. Across this long arc of dispossession and struggle, cultural work has been central to Palestinian resistance. For instance, a tradition of resistance literature, or adab al-muqawama (أدب المقاومة), rose from the ashes of the Nakba and has sustained Palestinian identity, documented colonial violence, and mobilised international solidarity. Wisam Rafeedie is one of the many writers who have contributed to this tradition. His novel, The Trinity of Fundamentals, first published in Arabic in 1998, offers profound insights into revolutionary subjectivity, political commitment, and the role of culture in national liberation.

Published ahead of the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People on 29 November, the same day that Resolution 181 was adopted, this art bulletin examines the tradition of militant Palestinian literature through Rafeedie’s work and the recent English translation of The Trinity of Fundamentals (2024) by the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM). Drawing from an interview with Kaleem Hawa, a Palestinian researcher and organiser with PYM, we explore how resistance literature has functioned as a weapon in the struggle for Palestinian liberation.

The Role of Palestinian Resistance Literature

Wisam Rafeedie’s Israeli prison ID card.

Palestinian resistance literature emerged from the conditions of Zionist settler colonialism backed by Western imperialism. Hawa explains that Palestinians theorise these conditions ‘as having at least three specific predicates: land alienation for primitive accumulation; population substitution, or ethnic cleansing; and a racial regime that produces segregation and organises society on the basis of Jewish supremacy’. Because Zionism wishes to instill ideological defeat, culture plays an important role in resisting these predicates. Palestinians fight back through a literature which conveys their political commitment, or iltizam (الْتِزام), and which might include sharing strategies for land defence. ‘Our cultural production also has an “offensive” function’, Hawa notes, ‘that is to counter Zionist propaganda, expand the base of popular struggle, and build enduring international solidarity’.

Against dispersal and disarticulation, culture binds Palestinians together around shared traditions and stories. Ghassan Kanafani, a Palestinian writer and member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), popularised theories of resistance literature. Assassinated by Israeli forces in Beirut on 8 July 1972, Kanafani understood resistance literature as a form of cultural production emerging from peripheral social formations engaged in the national liberation struggle. This literature spoke to the realities of the Palestinian subject in conditions of dispossession and reconstitution. For Kanafani, resistance literature was a literature of political commitment in the tradition of Arab iltizam. Its revolutionary character was connected to both production and circulation: ideas were articulated and shared collectively and creatively to combat Zionist desubjectification and dehumanisation. Literature became a weapon, or what Kanafani termed ‘the reclamation of the amputated leg’.

The larger Arab world has been essential to the production and dissemination of Palestinian cultural texts, both literature and film. In the face of Zionist ethnic cleansing and the targeting of knowledge-producing institutions, Palestinians turned to the wider region for strategic support. Hawa highlights the importance of Arab publishing houses, which have supported the production of Palestinian resistance literature, including Dar al-Adab and Dar al-Farabi in Beirut, Ittihad al-Kuttab al-‘Arab in Damascus, Dar al-Ahliyyah in Amman, and the General Egyptian Book Organisation in Cairo. Moreover, Arab revolutionary cinema of the 1970s and 1980s, routed through the National Film Organisation of Syria, produced enduring political statements such as Kafr Kassem (1975), filmed in the Syrian village of al-Shaykh Saad, about the 1956 Zionist massacre of Palestinians, and Al-Manam (The Dream, 1987) about the collective memories of Palestinians in exile, filmed in Lebanon’s camps.

The Zionist regime has not only relentlessly attacked sites of Palestinian and Arab cultural production but also destroyed sites of public convocation and collective memory, as witnessed by the looting of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) archives in Beirut in 1982. In Israel’s current carpet-bombing of south Lebanon, the Israeli military has strategically targeted town squares, markets, mosques, and libraries alongside resistance bases, aiming to disperse and isolate Palestinians from communal spaces where culture is exchanged and developed. This attack operates through physical violence and also through institutional destruction.

Love, Revolution, and Life

Wisam Rafeedie embodies the tradition of the militant writer, or an artist who is a member of a political organisation fighting for national liberation. He joined the PFLP at the age of sixteen. After living in hiding for nine years during the First Intifada, Rafeedie was captured by Israeli occupation forces in 1991. Rafeedie received a thirty-four month sentence and was held at al-Naqab prison in the southern Palestinian desert.

There, Rafeedie wrote The Trinity of Fundamentals in 1993, a novel narrated from the perspective of the protagonist Kan’an Subhi, a Palestinian revolutionary and party member who goes into hiding during a period of reconstitution for the resistance in the West Bank. In addition to ‘depicting his struggles through the boredom, despair, and frustration of his isolation, and his maturation into struggle, discipline, and political commitment’, says Hawa, ‘the novel also explores several theatres of tarakum (political accumulation, تَرَاكُم) in this period and is principally about Palestinian revolutionary subjectivity, as co-constitutive with the building of popular institutions and the liberation of the mind’. The trinity of fundamentals that structures Kan’an’s life in hiding is composed of love, revolution, and life itself.

The novel’s circulation embodies the collective practice of Palestinian resistance. The Trinity of Fundamentals spread throughout al-Naqab prison, smuggled in pill capsules and folded into dough balls thrown across prison cells. When a prison guard intercepted the manuscript, Rafeedie believed it was lost. Unbeknownst to him, a fellow prisoner from Gaza had hand-written another version and smuggled it out from al-Naqab to the Nafha prison by swallowing sheets folded into pill capsules. From there, a second copy of the manuscript circulated throughout most of Palestine’s prisons, becoming a staple of the Palestinian Prisoners’ Movement curriculum. The novel documents major moments in the Palestinian struggle, such as the First Intifada and the Gulf War, offering readers a view into internal debates among Palestinian political parties during that period.

Rafeedie’s trajectory mirrors that of other revolutionary cultural workers: Kanafani, who wrote novels while editing the PFLP’s magazine al-Hadaf (The Target) and drafting political programmes; Mahmoud Darwish, who in 1988 wrote the Palestinian Declaration of Independence while serving on the PLO’s executive committee (resigning in 1993 to protest the Oslo Accords); and Kamal Nasser, poet and head of the PLO media department, martyred by Israeli forces in Beirut on 10 April 1973. Hawa notes that these cultural workers and their struggles embody how the intellectual ‘who does not fight for revolution at all times is a false intellectual, and their intellect is deceptive and superficial’, citing Lebanese Marxist theorist Mahdi Amel.

Our People Are Not So Easy to Break

Ilga (Palestine and Chile), Palestina resiste (Palestine Resists), 2016. [Courtesy of Utopix.]

In 2023, several PYM members formed a committee to collectively produce The Trinity of Fundamentals in English. Published in January 2024 by 1804 Books and translated by Dr. Muhammad Tutunji, the new edition brings Rafeedie’s work to audiences beyond the Arab world. ‘Our thinking was that this novel contained within it several forms of knowledge that would be valuable to those coming into political consciousness and beginning their activities in the student and labour movements, or in their local communities’, Hawa explains. ‘Re-reading it now in a moment of brutal, unending sadism and destruction in Gaza, I am struck by just how true it is as a depiction of setback, and how it can help us to continue the fight, to recommit’.

The translation project exemplifies how revolutionary culture functions today. Hawa describes the most important characteristic as ‘the connection between youth culture and the collective experience of Palestinian elders’. After the Oslo Accords vitiated many Palestinian social and cultural institutions through the compradorisation of the Palestine bourgeoisie, Palestinian youth turned to video production and social media diaries to narrate their collective experience, including their alienation and steadfastness. Palestinian elders have struggled against concerted drives from the Arab governments to make them forget their history. ‘We see this connection between generations and geographies as the branches of our fighting spirit as Palestinians, one that needs nurturing by new institutions that are connected to a popular base, mass struggle, and which remain principally unflinching on the subject of Palestinians’ inalienable right to resist Zionism’, Hawa affirms.

A major challenge has been the scholasticide and epistemicide in Gaza – the total destruction of cultural and intellectual repositories in the form of people, institutions, and archives. ‘The heart of Palestine and its revolutionary culture sits in Gaza and the unimaginable loss of that accumulated knowledge and practice is a setback of historical magnitude’, Hawa states. Yet Palestinians remain and resist, writing poetry, song, and testimonies from ground zero of Zionist elimination. The People’s Centre for Palestine, 1804 Books, and Liberated Texts recently completed a translation of Wasim Said’s Witness to the Hellfire of Genocide: A Testimony from Gaza, published by 1804 Books in October 2025. The book weaves together accounts of the atrocities being perpetrated in Gaza, told partly from the author’s home in Beit Hanoun, now levelled. ‘Zionism’s programme of counterinsurgency seeks to destroy the Palestinian spirit – its will to resist and remain, its promise to return – and yet, our people are not so easy to break’, Hawa asserts.

Culture is Life

For Hawa, Palestinian liberation means recognising that, ‘In the Western world, culture is commodity, and the current production and circulation is a culture of death. In a sense, this is unavoidable and we are implicated in it, but I believe that there is value in a collective practice, if only to produce new spaces for the expression of Palestinian culture, which at its core is about life’. For Palestinians, writing is a conduit into universes of thought and experience severed from popular understandings in the West, a connection that is fragile and under siege.

The legacy of Palestinian resistance literature – from Kanafani to Darwish to Rafeedie – calls us to recognise culture as inseparable from political struggle. The Trinity of Fundamentals, written in captivity and smuggled out through collective action, now reaches new audiences through the dedicated work of Palestinian youth. Nearly eight decades after the Nakba, as genocide continues in Gaza, the tradition of militant literature reminds us that cultural work remains essential for Palestinian liberation. As Hawa affirms, the role of the militant writer today is to remain engaged in struggle; to strengthen sumud (صُمُود), or the Palestinian concept of steadfastness and determination to remain on the land; and to resist collaboration with Western Zionist regimes and the normalisation of violence and genocide. The international solidarity built through resistance literature expands the base of popular struggle and keeps the promise of return alive.

In Other News…

Kael Abello (Venezuela), Símbolos de resistencia (Symbols of Resistance), 2024. [Courtesy of Utopix.]

Earlier this month, we published our latest dossier, Despite Everything: Cultural Resistance for a Free Palestine, examining how Palestinian artists have responded to the changing conjuncture since the Nakba through their cultural and political work.

On 30 November 2025, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research alongside the International Peoples’ Assembly and Utopix are organising a webinar to launch the dossier. The webinar will bring together Palestinian novelist Bassem Khandaqji, who was imprisoned by the Israeli regime for nineteen years and recently released in the prisoner exchange, Palestinian actor and filmmaker Mohammad Bakri, and Chilean-Palestinian visual artist Rasan Abu Apara. I will have the honour of moderating the event, which seeks to inspire our continued solidarity work, both cultural and political, until Palestine is free.

Warmly,

Tings Chak
Art Director, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research

Listen to ‘Samba da Natureza’ (Nature’s Samba) by Lupércio.

Part of the struggle for land is the struggle over the image. How do those who work the land, and how does the land itself, find visual expression through the dominant modes of representation? This dual struggle is currently exemplified through an initiative organised by the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) in Brazil, one of the world’s largest social movements and political forces. This year, the MST launched a national photography campaign called Registros da Terra: o MST e os biomas brasileiros (Records of the Earth: the MST and Brazil’s Biomes), a cultural-political offensive designed to redefine the symbolic relationship between humanity and nature. The campaign, which emerges from the movement’s decades-long struggle for land, popular agrarian reform, and social transformation, places the landless workers’ vision at the centre of the global ecological crisis.

The Symbolic Struggle for the Earth

Photo credit: Juliana Barbosa.

Registros da Terra grew directly out of the MST’s 2020 National Plan, Plant Trees, Produce Healthy Food. The plan has deepened reflections on environmental themes and their visual representation over the last five years. As Janelson Ferreira of the MST’s communications sector explained to us in an interview for this Art Bulletin, the initiative was born from a recognition that the movement’s photography often fell short and needed to change.

Ferreira pointed out that, previously, the movement’s visual identity often defaulted to a generic image of nature – ‘always that great forest with the little animals and such, as well as human beings’. This representation ‘did not reflect the perspective we held and defended’. Even images of agroecology were unimaginative, like close-ups of hands holding seeds. These images prompted crucial questions such as, ‘But whose hand is this? What human being is this? It’s just a hand: it has no heart, no head, no history. Where does this person come from?’

From this self-reflexivity emerged a ‘qualitative leap’, in the words of Ferreira, which shifted the focus to the concrete, lived, and political relationship between the landless people and the biomes of Brazil. As Renata Menezes, an MST militant and one of the organisers of Registros da Terra put it, the campaign is about confronting the rupture between human beings and nature through ‘the dispute of symbolism, through the dispute of images’. In other words, the idea is that the MST confronts this challenge by focusing on representing their popular agrarian reform project and reasserting the deep connection between human beings, society, and nature through the images themselves.

The goal is two-fold: to condemn and to affirm. While the campaign exposes the role of agribusiness in destruction, deforestation, and the poisoning of water sources as ‘the destroyer[s] of our biomes’, its core mission is to showcase the alternative that the MST is already building. Menezes affirmed:

It is looking at this dimension of condemning, which I think is one of the things we would most like to showcase, because photography… is a way for us to look at the world, to relate to it, from the different visions, different lenses that are placed on this society. So, of course we need to condemn the model, but it is also important that, with these lenses, we can showcase the kind of society we want to achieve and how it already exists in small processes through popular agrarian reform.

Landless peasants, MST militants, and their supporters are invited to submit photography for the campaign interpreting the following themes:

• The MST: Protecting Biomes Through Land Struggle,
• Agroecology as a Model for Nature Protection,
• Producing Healthy Food to Protect Nature,
• Water, Common Good of All People, and
• Agribusiness, Destroyer of Our Biomes.

Menezes also stressed the importance of highlighting all of Brazil’s biomes, from the semi-arid Caatinga to the southern Pampa. This is an intentional choice to ensure that the representation of nature is not confined to ‘merely the super-valorisation of the dense forest like the Atlantic Forest, like the Amazon’, but that it also includes the diversity of the Cerrado and other crucial ecosystems.

Massification of the Extraordinary Everyday

Photo credit: Juliana Barbosa.

One of the revolutionary aspects of this campaign is its commitment to the massification of the photographic language. The MST is not looking for professional gallery photographs, but rather self-portraits of its own struggle. As Menezes put it, ‘One of the dreams we have is to break from [the privileging of] professional photographers. We want to build a process that makes this campaign part of a massification of the language [of photography] within the movement as well’.

The MST encourages mass participation, actively challenging the ‘dominant position that only a photographer can take photos’. Instead, Menezes emphasised, ‘We stress a lot that people who “only” have a cell phone can send photos… The requirement is that anyone can send a photo’. This practice democratises the visual record, valorising the perspective of the peasants who work and defend the land. The peasants are not merely photographic subjects but the authors of their own images, stories, and histories.

The campaign’s organisers are currently grappling with the curatorial challenge this practice presents, seeking a delicate balance that prioritises political content over technical perfection. Menezes acknowledged the need to ‘build a balance between that image which might not be up to the technical standards… but which carries a content and a story, including the very aesthetic of someone who takes a photo with a cell phone’. This is a political statement in itself: the aesthetics of the struggle captured by its own militants supersede the formal bourgeois artistic standards. The curatorial team ensures that the political and historical context is the primary balancer in the collection by including work from comrades in the field of photography as well as many MST landless militants. While the submissions deadline is still approaching, the photographs received thus far bear this out. They are largely portraits of daily life, ‘photos that seem to carry poetry within them’. They are the reality of the ‘extraordinary everyday’.

These are not staged scenes. They are testimonies of food being harvested, of a base group meeting, of a simple moment of beauty witnessing an endangered bird flying by in a threatened biome. The process of shaping one’s own vision to uplift and amplify the collective self-confidence and political identity of the rural workers and the defenders of the land lies at the heart of this political photographic campaign.

The Legacy of the Militant Artist

Right: Illustration from our latest Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research dossier, The Environmental Crisis Is a Capitalist Crisis.

The campaign also pays homage to the Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado (1944–2025), a figure who symbolises the power of the militant artist collaborating with social movements. Salgado, whose work documents the lives of workers and the planet’s untouched landscapes, had a long history of solidarity and collaboration with the MST. For instance, he covered the 1996 Eldorado dos Carajás massacre, in which nineteen MST members were assassinated by the military police during a peaceful protest, and created the photography book Terra: Struggle for the Landless (1997) with a preface by José Saramago and poems by Chico Buarque. Proceeds from the book’s sales helped build the MST’s Florestan Fernandes National School (ENFF).

Ferreira reflects on this legacy almost three decades later, noting that Terra is found in nearly all secretariats and other MST spaces nationwide as well as internationally. The work served as a crucial element of national unity and political organisation, reinforcing the ‘collective self-esteem’ of the landless peasants themselves through photography. To her, this is the ‘most concrete thing’ of Salgado’s legacy. She added, ‘Our families begin to recognise themselves… to identify themselves in the works [is] an important element of unity… which, in the end, fulfils an organisational role that is essential’.

Menezes emphasised three points that were raised at the commemorative event held in Salgado’s honour at the ENFF: his humanist values and commitment to the histories and struggles of various peoples around the world; his care for nature, concretised through the actions of the Instituto Terra, which disseminates Salgado’s photographic documentation around the world to raise awareness and resources to reforest the Atlantic Forest; and his profound commitment to internationalist struggle practised through photography.

Menezes reiterated, ‘We are always vigilant’, as a way to honour, continue, and protect his legacy from potential depoliticisation. Salgado’s photos are also featured in our dossier this month, The Environmental Crisis Is a Capitalist Crisis.

Photo credit: Wellington Lenon.

The MST’s Registros da Terra campaign is a continuation of this vigilance. It does not simply honour the great artist. It issues a powerful call for a new generation of militant artists and activists – the landless workers themselves – to take up the camera to condemn the environmental crimes they witness and to uplift a possible model of coexistence between humans and nature. In other words, the campaign encourages them to become the authors of a new history. It is a powerful affirmation that the struggle for the environment and for socialism is also a cultural and aesthetic one, a daily work of poetry against the brutal, hegemonic narratives and images of capital that are destroying our planet. This campaign and this vision beautifully embody the words of Salgado, ‘I photograph what is most human in us: the struggle, the suffering, but also the resilience and the hope’.

With resilience and hope,

Tings Chak
Art Director, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research

P.S. Don’t forget to check out our portrait gallery of the month, honouring revolutionaries from around the world.