LRBS Week 2: 23 - 27 June 2025
This course introduces a range of modern pamphlets published internationally in the 20th and 21st centuries, but with reference to significant earlier examples of the form published from Britain. Seminars will involve discussing, seeing and handling texts ranging from Marx and Engels’ The Communist Manifesto (1848) to the Internationalist Commune of Rojava’s Make Rojava Green Again (2018).
The focus will be works that extend both the rhetorical and aesthetic possibilities of the political pamphlet. This could be by incorporating aspects of other forms – the catechism and slogan, the prose poem and self-help book. But it could also be through the distinctive use of materials and distribution networks: texts such as the cartonera, handmade with scrap cardboard and sold on streets across Latin America, and the pamphlets distributed online by ‘anti-profit and seditious’ publisher Dog Section Press.
The course will make use of Senate House library’s pamphlet collections, in particular, the Ron Heisler, Pelling and the Latin American political pamphlet collections. There will also be offsite visits to other collections. These will include the cartonera at the British Library, fascist and anti-fascist literature in the Wiener Holocaust Library, British Black Power publications in the Black Cultural Archives, and African market literature (pamphlets sold in the Nigerian city of Onitsha) in the School of Oriental and African Studies library. Students will gain hands-on experience of pamphlet making during a workshop at the London Centre for Book Arts on the final day.
The course is aimed at students, academics, librarians, teachers, writers, and enthusiasts, who are interested in including a wider range of literature and approaches in their teaching and research.
By the end of the course, students will be able to:
- Critically analyse the contents, visual and material aspects of these pamphlets, and how these different elements inform one another.
- Understand the means by which these texts were produced and distributed, and evaluate some of their historical and political contexts
- Engage with publications produced beyond north America and western Europe, and consider how they relate to a selection of chapbooks and pamphlets published from Britain
