Afro-Asian Writers Research Articles

Tokyo in Tashkent: The Afro-Asian Writers Association and Japanese Cold War Dissent

Abstract In October 1958, seven Japanese writers attended the first great cultural event of the Bandung era, the week-long Afro-Asian Writers Conference held in Tashkent, the capital of Soviet Uzbekistan. The ‘literary Bandung’ resulted in the creation of the Afro-Asian Writers Association (AAWA), a source of growing interest among historians of anti-colonialism for the institutions it founded to support a literary culture unmediated by London, Paris or New York, and thereby advance political solidarity among colonized and newly independent countries in the so-called Third World. The participation of writers from Japan, a former empire aligned with the United States, has no place in the historiography of post-war Japan, the Cold War or decolonization. Japanese participants and observers used the conference and the AAWA as a means of dissent equally unfamiliar in received narratives. They argued that commitment to the decolonization of Asia and Africa offered a means to resist amnesia about Japan’s colonialist history and obstruct its role in the American empire. The work of Japanese writers in Tashkent and after reveals a broader genealogy of Afro-Asianism and anti-colonial internationalism and opportunities for dissent made possible by crossing between post-imperial and postcolonial worlds in the Bandung era.

Decolonizing Comparative Literature

This essay seeks to contribute to ongoing debates about disciplinary decolonization in Comparative Literature by urging scholars and students to return to the literature and theory of twentieth-century anticolonial liberation struggles. I begin by considering the relationship of Comparative Literature as it is currently practised in the metropolitan academy to earlier projects of cultural decolonization, focusing particularly on the contrast between the depoliticized ‘worlding’ of the discipline and the more radical and purposeful comparative praxis demonstrated by the Afro-Asian Writers' Association's literary journal Lotus (1968–91). I then turn to examples of literary criticism by two major fiction writers, theorists and party activists with ties to Lotus: Ghassan Kanafani (Palestine, 1936–72) and Alex La Guma (South Africa, 1924–85). Putting their work into conversation enables us to challenge the distance from organized struggle that most contemporary criticism maintains, while also developing our understanding of the conditions, principles, and tactics of what Kanafani famously called adab al-muqāwama, or resistance literature, a concept that any attempt to decolonize Comparative Literature cannot do without.

The Soviet Invention of Postcolonial Studies

Abstract The complex relations between the Soviet Union and the Soviet states of the Caucasus that were formerly parts of the Ottoman and Persian empires offer examples of complex cultural and political relations of antagonism and appropriation that go beyond simple binaries of resistance or nationalist anti-eurocentrism. Though their work is little known except to scholars in Slavic Studies, in the years following the Russian Revolution of 1917 Soviet Orientologists laid the foundations for the critique of Western Orientalism that would be introduced to the West many years later in 1978 by Edward W. Said. The Soviet critique of the imperialist foundations of Eurocentric culture and academic knowledge formed the basis for the huge World Literature publishing project pioneered by Maxim Gorky, an initiative which has been largely disregarded—both historically and theoretically—in the Western rediscovery of World Literature in the era of globalization. Similarly, Western postcolonial scholars have only recently begun to acknowledge the creative, cultural and political affiliations of Global South writers to internationalist organizations such as the Afro-Asian Writers Association which was supported by the Soviet Union in the Cold War period and the importance of publications such as Lotus magazine. The books reviewed here demonstrate the degree to which histories of “postcolonialism” and the late Western critique of Orientalism have now been rewritten to acknowledge their sources in earlier critiques by Soviet scholars in the first half of the twentieth century.

Иностранная комиссия Союза писателей в 1960-е гг.: приоритеты, особенности работы, вызовы

The Foreign Commission of the Soviet Writers’ Union, founded at the same time as the Union in the 1930s, was supposed to follow the principles and techniques generally accepted among Soviet institutions of foreign propaganda, but the practice of this institution differed due to the human factor and the specific nature of the writers’ profession. In the 1960s, the priority of the Foreign Commission of the Soviet Writers’ Union was personal contacts with foreign writers, as well as interaction with international organisations such as European community of writers (COMES), PEN-Club and the Afro-Asian Writers’ Bureau. The Commission was also involved in the struggle for influence over Third World writers, and this struggle developed in competition with Cuba and China. Nevertheless, it was not foreign policy factors that led the Writers’ Union to isolation at the end of the decade, but campaigns against writers and dissidents inside the country. The Sinyavsky–Daniel trial paved the way for a deeper crisis following the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. By creating a semblance of well-being with the help of statistics, the Commission’s staff was aware that the prestige of Soviet literature had been severely damaged.

Third World Crossings

The Bandung Conference of 1955 is often described as the beginning of what Vijay Prashad called the “Third World” project. While it is undeniable that intergovernmental gatherings had largely facilitated the political connections between Chinese and African leaders, no less significant in cultivating a heightened Bandung Spirit in the decolonizing world were the “transnational networks” such as the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Conference (1957), the Afro-Asian Writers’ Conference (1958), the Afro-Asian Women’s Conference (1961) and the Afro-Asian Journalists’ Association (1963). These platforms allowed a privileged group of writers to travel to Africa. Feng Zhidan, Du Xuan and Han Beiping were among them. Their travel notes, later published as 西非八国漫记 (Glimpses into West Africa, 1962), 西非日记 (West Africa Diary, 1964) and 非洲夜会 (Nights in Africa, 1964), carefully described local landscapes, climate and architecture, as well as their personal encounters with Africans from diverse social backgrounds outside the state apparatus. Likewise, a Malian minister and writer, Mamadou Gologo, recounted his tours in China and his deep appreciation for the country. China: A Great People, A Great Destiny (La Chine, un peuple géant, un grand destin) was published in both English and French by New World Press in Beijing in 1965. Like an X on a map, crossing marks both a place and a process, an intersection and a journey. This essay aims to explore the multi-dimensional “crossings” of individuals, texts and circulation networks that went beyond national boundaries and the Cold War binary. It argues that travelogues, as both under-explored archives and literary writings, help to reveal the tangible nature of Afro-Asian solidarity, felt through individual encounters and sometimes fragile emotional bonds.

Institutionalizing Afro-Asianism: Lotus and the (Dis) Contents of Soviet-Third World Cultural Politics

ABSTRACT This article examines the Afro-Asian Writers’ Association’s (AAWA) magazine, Lotus, as an example of the cultural discourse of Afro-Asianism and the logistical and political challenges of institutionalizing a Third World literary canon within the broader context of Cold War alliances. The author's focus on the magazine’s conceptual vocabulary and its internal mechanisms reveals how anticolonial writers and cultural actors brought their own different (often, competing) versions of Marxism and varying degrees of alignment with Soviet-style socialism to the project of cultural decolonization and contributed to a global socialist order. Concerns of literary form, political liberation, and the context of noncommercial patronage shaped an all-encompassing cumulative aesthetic that was not always aligned with Moscow mandates. Her reading of the Lotus archive also draws out the frictions between various geopolitical pivots of the Afro-Asian—a focus on nation, civilization, race, and the larger socialist internationalism—to contribute to studies of the political entanglements between postcolonial and postsocialist studies that can offer insights into current geopolitical predicaments, especially for regions that continue to suffer from new and old forms of occupation and imperialism.

At Penpoint: African Literatures, Postcolonial Studies, and the Cold War

At Penpoint: African Literatures, Postcolonial Studies, and the Cold War

From Internationalism to Postcolonialism: Literature and Cinema Between the Second and Third Worlds

From Internationalism to Postcolonialism: Literature and Cinema Between the Second and Third Worlds

Rethinking the History of Chinese Empires from the Sinophone South

ABSTRACT This article juxtaposes the Singapore playwright Kuo Pao Kun's imagining of ancient maritime trade with evocations of similar histories in the discourse of Afro-Asian solidarity that was inspired by the Bandung Conference of 1955. At the first “Afro-Asian Writers' Conference” held at Tashkent, Uzbekistan, in 1958, several members of the Chinese delegation framed the cultural exchange among Third World nations in terms of the Silk Road. These allusions highlight the deep memory of non-western empires and a circulatory history that embedded the nation-state as a dominant political form and intellectual framework for discussions of international exchange. Trying to articulate the discourse of Afro-Asian solidarity of the 1950s and 1960s with some recent concerns regarding sinophone culture in Chinese studies, this article calls attention to the sinophone South, the vastly uneven geography where the “South,” as both concept and location, overlaps with the Chinese script world. My research shows that many sinophone intellectuals and authors embraced the “Third-Worldist, antiimperialist, nationalist” agendas. Their activities constitute the vibrant scenes of the global sixties, but because of their nonnational status, they remain neglected by existing discussions of Third World exchange and global Maoism.

From Internationalism to Postcolonialism: Literature and Cinema between the Second and the Third Worlds

From Internationalism to Postcolonialism: Literature and Cinema between the Second and the Third Worlds

A Poetics of the Writers' Conference: Literary Relation in the Cold War World

Abstract This article offers a poetics of the writers' conference as conducted via channels of Cold War–era cultural diplomacy through a reading of the Asian Writers' Conference (New Delhi, 1956), a largely forgotten predecessor of the better-known Afro-Asian Writers' Conferences. Focusing particularly on the Chinese writers in attendance, I read the conference literarily, with an eye to its aesthetics and the particular performance of transnational literary relation that it engendered. The Conference's fortuitous confluence with the Hundred Flowers Campaign in China unexpectedly made possible an approach to transnational literary exchange that actively eschewed and rebelled against state intervention in the literary sphere. As such, the Asian Writers' Conference effected a form of transnational literary relation that thrived in its self-avowed uselessness to mandates of diplomacy. The Conference warns against the tendency in South–South studies to valorize the decentering of colonial powers as cultural mediators without a critical engagement with the nation-state's overseeing presence once it occupies that agential role in transnational literary exchange.

Neutralizing English: Han Suyin and the language politics of Third World literature

ABSTRACT The writings of Han Suyin during her sojourn in British Malaya from the 1950s to 1960s are a rich archive for understanding how the Cold War’s impact on postcolonial nation-building contributed to the remaking of English as a supposedly neutral language. Han styled herself as a spokesperson for China to the English-speaking world during the early decades of communist rule. Her writings arguably helped to fashion English as a transparent medium for representing Asia, a conception of language that informs global literary publishing today. Yet her work, which was influenced by her participation in the Afro-Asian Writers Conferences organized in the wake of the 1955 Bandung Conference, as well as her experience of living in Malaya during the colonial counter-insurgency against communists, also offers insights on how English’s neutrality ought to be understood in relation to forestalled Third World movements and racialized antagonisms in postcolonial nations.

Global Tashkent: Transnational Visions of a Soviet City in the Postcolonial World, 1953–1966

SUMMARY:In the 1950s and 1960s, the Soviet city of Tashkent emerged as a showcase of socialism for the Third World. Scores of visitors traveled to the city from decolonizing countries, encountering Soviet presentations of the city's advanced modernity and authentic Asian culture. This article focuses on accounts of Tashkent produced by these visitors, suggesting they be understood as a coherent transnational discourse. Examining travelogues by Indian observers in the 1950s, as well as accounts of the Afro-Asian Writers Conference of 1958 and the Indo-Pakistani Peace Conference of 1966, it argues that Tashkent served as a site to engage with the project of the Third World, especially the problems of non-European modernity and postcolonial solidarity therein. Accounts of the city reflected both the hopes and tensions of Third Worldism in the Eurocentric world of the Cold War.Резюме:В 1950–1960-х гг. Ташкент стал витриной социализма для стран Третьего мира. Десятки иностранных гостей города из деколонизирующихся стран столкнулись здесь с советскими представлениями о модерности и аутентичной азиатской культуре. Исследуя травелоги индийских интеллектуалов 1950-х гг., а также отчеты о Ташкентской конференции писателей стран Азии и Африки (1958) и Ташкентской конференции по урегулированию Индо-Пакистанского конфликта (1966), статья показывает, что Ташкент был локусом советской вовлеченности в проект Третьего мира, особенно в том, что касалось проблем неевропейской модерности и постколониальной солидарности. Ташкентские травелоги отражали надежды идеологов Третьего мира и фрустрацию, которую они испытывали в европоцентричном интеллектуальном пространстве времен холодной войны.

Resistance Literature and Occupied Palestine in Cold War Beirut

For the last decade of his life, the Palestinian intellectual, author, and editor Ghassan Kanafani (d. 1972) was deeply immersed in theorizing, lecturing, and publishing on Palestinian resistance literature from Beirut. A refugee of the 1948 war, Kanafani presented his theory of resistance literature and the notion of “cultural siege” at the March 1967 Beirut conference of the Soviet-funded Afro-Asian Writers Association (AAWA). Articulated in resistance to Zionist propaganda literature and in solidarity with Marxist-Leninist revolutionary struggles in the Third World, Kanafani was inspired by Maxim Gorky, William Faulkner, and Mao Zedong alike. In books, essays, and lectures, Kanafani argued that Zionist propaganda literature served as a “weapon” in the war against Palestine, returning repeatedly to Arthur Koestler’s 1946 Thieves in the Night. Better known for his critique of Stalinism in Darkness at Noon (1940), Koestler was also actively involved in waging cultural Cold War, writing the United States Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) Congress for Cultural Freedom 1950 manifesto and helping the organization infiltrate Afro-Asian writing in the wake of Bandung. Kanafani’s 1960s theory of resistance literature thus responded at once to the psychological dislocation of Zionist propaganda fiction and the cultural infiltration of Arabic literature in the Cold War.

Lotus and the Self-Representation of Afro-Asian Writers as the Vanguard of Modernity

This essay has two aims. The first is to show that the editors of Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings and some of the writers who contributed to it (especially Ismail Ezzedine, Anar Rzayev, Tawfick Zeyad, Abdel Aziz El-Ahwani, Joseph Ki-Zerbo, Alex La Guma, Adonis, Salah Dehni, Luis Bernardo Honwana, Ghassan Kanafany, and Tozaburo Ono) attempted to reconceive of nationalism in a way that would make international solidarity constitutive of the new national projects. It is argued that this is quite different from thinking of the contributors to Lotus as abandoning nationalism in favor of a supranationalist project. The second aim is to show that at least some of the contributors to Lotus thought of themselves as being the vanguard of modernity, and not as the creators of “alternative modernities”. This essay shows that some of the aforementioned contributors to Lotus implicitly drew on standpoint epistemology in order to argue that, due to their struggles against colonialism, racial discrimination, etc., they had a privileged epistemic vantage point from which to criticize modernity in its European form for not being modern enough.

Global Souths

This essay explores alternative forms of political solidarity through a poiesis of longing that connects the Soviet aligned “South” in Kyrgyzstan and nonaligned “South” in decolonizing Algeria through a reading of two love stories by the Kyrgyz author and diplomat Chingiz Aitmatov, writing in 1958 on the periphery of the Soviet Union, and Algerian poet and political leader Malek Haddad, writing a year later amid the Algerian War of Independence. Tracing the relationships between Global Souths, which included institutional and personal networks that persisted despite an often tense ideological divide between the Soviet aligned and nonaligned nations, I render visible the relationship between two genealogies of anti-imperial thinking born from the nonaligned Bandung and the lesser known Soviet affiliate, the Afro-Asian Writers’ Association. In this way, I argue that the Global South is more than a place; it is a set of relations that structure a political consciousness through a longing or desire for (non)alignment.

Translating Solidarity

Abstract This interview with veteran Egyptian translator and interpreter Nehad Salem is preceded by an introduction that situates her biography and formation in relation to the key, interconnected international/internationalist forums in which her career unfolded. A dedicated Third Worldist, Salem participated in crucial events of the liberation period, including the resistance in Port Said during the Suez War, and taught in Algeria in the wake of decolonization. Spotlighting her work in institutions such as the Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Organization, the Afro-Asian Writers’ Association, and UNESCO, the interview addresses issues of gender and agency in relation to the translator/interpreter, and the poetics and politics of literary translation. The interview traces details about the literary history of the liberation period through Salem's work in the journal Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings, edited by, among others, the Egyptian writer Edwar al-Kharrat, and her translations of the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish and the Egyptian poet Salah Jahin.

“A world to win”: China, the Afro-Asian Writers’ Bureau, and the Reinvention of World Literature

ABSTRACT This article analyzes Chinese contributions to the Afro-Asian Writers’ Bureau’s efforts to reinvent World Literature from an anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist perspective. The Afro-Asian Writers’ Bureau was founded as a counter-narrative to Eurocentric conceptions of World Literature and universal culture. The AAWB’s vision was inspired by a Marxian understanding of worldliness. Relying on Chinese archival materials, this article shows how Chinese representatives to the AAWB, including Zhou Yang and Mao Dun, shifted from an explicitly Soviet, socialist-realist model for World Literature inspired by Maxim Gorky to a progressively independent, nationalist course in the wake of the Sino-Soviet split. The story of the AAWB is one of competing universal visions. The Chinese contributions to the AAWB are also reflected in China’s current expanding cultural influence and soft power in the Global South.

Nazım Hikmet’s Afro-Asian solidarities

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.

Nationalism and internationalism: thoughts on Zhang Chengzhi’s work and Afro-Asian Writers’ Conference

ABSTRACTNationalism in the Third World is shaped through the processes of anti-imperial and anti-feudal modernization, and is closely connected with communist internationalism. It differentiates from the nationalism formed in the context of the European modernization. Nevertheless, with the establishment of the nation-state, in the context of international politics and geopolitics and during the construction of modernization in the realms of politics, economy and culture, progressive nationalism can be reactionary. Via analysing the emotions and thinkings of Zhang Chengzhi’s writing on Japan and reviewing the history of Afro-Asian Writers’ Conference in 1950s and 1960s, this essay argues that internationalism is the effective thinking resource to overcome reactionary nationalism.