Nazım Hikmet’s Afro-Asian solidarities

Abstract

This paper explores literary-political expressions of solidarity with the rise of African decolonization struggles during the Cold War era, by zooming in on the work of a renowned Turkish poet, Nazım Hikmet Ran. First, I argue that Hikmet’s poetry offers transnational solidarities that not only assert the political agency of anticolonial uprisings but also negate the persisting mechanisms of racial and economic oppression after colonial rule. Second, in taking into account Hikmet’s active participation in the “Afro-Asian Writers’ Bureau,” I show how his vision of solidarity reveals alternative patterns of correspondence between peripheral sites of modernism and world literature’s cross-cultural encounters within the Global South. Lastly, I argue that Hikmet’s poetry generates new models of collective agency and solidarity that are imagined both through and against the discourse of the news. His mixture of lyric and documentary components, I argue, calls for close attention to the formal aspects of his discourse of solidarity.