Bandung Anxieties

The Bandung Conference was held in the eponymous city in Indonesia April 18–24, 1955, and is widely regarded as the first summit of Africa-Asia during the Cold War period. This section will not rehash the arguments of many books and articles written about the conference other than to highlight its commitment to nonalignment, decolonization, and humanism.Footnote ⁶ Although they did not use the term, the conference provided a preliminary concept of postcolonialism through its commitment to “Bandung spirit.” Delegates described this spirit with an affirmation of Asia and Africa as “the cradle of great religions and civilization which have enriched other cultures and civilizations while themselves being enriched in the process [and] are based on spiritual and universal foundations.”Footnote ⁷ With the absence of the Soviet Union, excluded on geographic grounds, many looked to China as the would-be harbinger of ideological dissension. However, Zhou Enlai surprised many delegates with his commitment with Nehru to the solidarity principles formulated earlier in 1954 at Bogor: “If we seek common ground in doing away with the sufferings and calamities under colonialism, it will be very easy for us to have mutual understand and respect, mutual sympathy and support, instead of mutual suspicion and fear, mutual exclusion, and antagonism.”Footnote ⁸ This conciliatory stance strategically inserted China’s own history of semi-coloniality into the larger history of colonialism in different parts of Asia and Africa. Zhou sought to show that China not only shared this history but could also be looked to as a leader of third world anticolonialism.Footnote ⁹

However, a skeptical Richard Wright maintained that as socialism had once turned from Europe to Asia, it had now begun to work its way into Africa. He wrote that Zhou Enlai “by promising to behave, had built a bridgehead that had found foundations not only in Asia but extended even into tribal black Africa.”Footnote ¹⁰ For Wright, nonalignment was a pretext for the spread of the socialist bloc to Africa by both the Soviet Union and “Red China.” Their goal would be to convince proponents of nonalignment that a third path to development could not ignore socialist critiques of colonialism as a form of capitalism. Wright feared this argument would prove more effective if not explicitly stated at the conference. Zhou’s example of China’s semicolonial history might then provide fodder to the spread of socialism to the African continent.Footnote ¹¹

Wright’s anxiety about Maoism was not unfounded. The attraction of Maoism as an alternative form of socialism resonated with many black leftists during the fifties and sixties because it not only provided a handbook for guerilla warfare, but also represented the first reformulation of Marxism by a non-industrialized and non-Western nation-state. Furthermore, it was different than Soviet models because it located class struggle in an alliance between the urban proletariat and rural peasantry. China’s Great Leap Forward from 1958 to 1961—although later revealed as a famine-producing disaster—would initially be interpreted during the period as an attempt to skip Marx’s stages of history.Footnote ¹² These stages were based on urban industrialization as a precursor to socialism. By asserting development could skip directly to a socialist stage, many third world leaders saw in Maoism the possibility of a fresh economic start outside of capitalist models. In 1956, one year after Bandung and one year before the AAPSO’s inaugural meeting in Cairo, Maoism represented the only “implemented” non-Western socialism.

An arresting case-in-point is Aimé Césaire’s resignation from the French Communist Party in his Letter to Maurice Thorez in 1956.Footnote ¹³ Although not present at Bandung, Césaire writes, “In any case, it is clear that our struggle—the struggle of colonial peoples against colonialism, the struggle of peoples of color against racism—is more complex, or better yet, of a completely different nature than the fight of the French worker against French capitalism, and it cannot in any way be considered a part, a fragment, of that struggle.”Footnote ¹⁴ Césaire’s resignation signaled a fundamental break in the capacity of European Marxism to address itself to the racialized “other” in the third world. As such, Césaire was at pains to demonstrate the collusion of race with class in the anticolonial struggle. Because the colonial system represented the apex of European industrial capitalism for Césaire, the inability of European communists to accommodate the colonial world demonstrated their inability to overcome cultural and racial difference as historical elements within and beyond class. For Césaire, the fact the French working class continued to be the organization’s primary focus ignored the history of global colonialism; the French factory could exist only due to the pervasive system of resource extraction from the colony. The alienation of the factory worker in the metropole was, for Césaire, dependent upon the exploitation, racism, and dehumanization of the colonial subject.

Wright’s anxiety at Bandung is thereby succinctly stated by Césaire toward the end of his letter in 1956: “There exists a Chinese communism. Without being very familiar with it, I have a very strong prejudice in its favor. And I expect it not to slip into the monstrous errors that have disfigured European communism.”Footnote ¹⁵ This turn away from the colonial metropole and toward China—however ironic given historical hindsight—pinpointed the failure of European socialism to address colonialism. In his dissatisfaction, Césaire pointed to a non-Western experiment that claimed to have shed colonial racism and implemented a socialism predicated on historical, cultural, and linguistic difference. As a socialism from a country with its own semicolonial history, Maoism was as seductive an idea—for all its “oriental” exoticism and alleged successes—as any leading up to the mass decolonization of the sixties. Césaire’s letter thereby signaled a crisis in French, and possibly European, Marxism as a whole. The rising presence of Maoism-as-alternative, however misguided, deepened the divide between first and third world negotiations of socialist solidarity.Footnote ¹⁶

The “Concept of History” and “Symbolic Maoism”

Fredric Jameson’s 1984 article, “Periodizing the 60s,” is especially relevant to this context of Cold War solidarities. Following Louis Althusser, he writes “as old-fashioned or ‘realistic’ historiography became problematic, the historian should reformulate her vocation—not any longer to produce some vivid representation of History ‘as it really happened,’ but rather to produce the concept of history.” For Jameson, this concept of history is made of four levels: “the history of philosophy, revolutionary political theory and practice, cultural production, and economic cycles.”Footnote ¹⁷ Later in the same essay, Jameson continues to describe his concept of history as the “problem of some ‘unified field theory’ in terms of which such seemingly distant realities as third-world peasant movements and first-world mass culture (or indeed, more abstractly, the intellectual or superstructural levels like philosophy and culture generally, and those of mass resistance and political practice) might conceptually be related in some coherent way.”Footnote ¹⁸ Jameson’s periodization of the sixties thereby relies on myriad factors that stretch synchronically across historical, economic, and cultural spheres. It is this entanglement of people, ideas (both economic and cultural), and geographies that produces a comprehensive, yet flexible definition of a concept, and in turn, periodization.

Ato Quayson explores a similar “concept of history” in his own formulations of “colonial space-making” as “defined by a sets of relations that were structurally produced and contested across a series of interrelated vectors throughout the colonial encounter.”Footnote ¹⁹ These frameworks help rethink periodization outside a set of linear or chronological circumstances that posit independence as the decidingly banal hinge in the designation of the postcolonial. As will be discussed following, the Afro-Asian solidarity movement in many ways embodied, to modify Quayson’s phrasing, an “anticolonial space making.”

Also reminiscent of Raymond Williams’s “structures of feeling,” this methodology takes into account variables from across the synchronic board.Footnote ²⁰ If periodization is a concept rather than a linear slog forward, then it is possible to trace cultural currents of a period across various geopolitical contexts. As such, this section will explore what Jameson, in that same essay, coins as “symbolic Maoism” in relationship to Afro-Asian solidarity represented by the AAPSO and AAWB. It will also argue the lion’s share of the AAWB’s cultural work was to formulate a concept of postcolonialism, and by extension, history, from a global South perspective. Through their writer summits and publications, the bureau brought together disparate vectors—Maoism, pan-Africanism, humanism, transnational solidarity—to produce an “emergent” (Williams) postcolonial aesthetic. This aesthetic was linked to cultural struggle in the historical moment of decolonization and its incipient neocolonialism.

Jameson never explicitly defines his term “symbolic Maoism,” preferring to describe it as a “shadowy but central presence” in his 1984 essay.Footnote ²¹ As such, “symbolic Maoism” is not Maoism as it was implemented in China. It exists when it is “read” into existence by an outside actor. For example, it resides in the ubiquitous image of Mao as a central component of revolutionary kitsch, or in the many interpretations of his “little red book.” As a symbol it is then “indefinite, but richly—even boundlessly suggestive in its significance.”Footnote ²² The “symbolic” in “symbolic Maoism” is thereby its capacity to operate as a cipher. Maoism becomes symbolic through its interpretation into a variety of contexts. For many scholars including Jameson, the primary example is the French Maoism of the sixties. For this essay, however, it resides in its appropriation by the AAWB during the fifties and early sixties.

Maoism has often been the object of en vogue exoticism—a revolutionary model from the “Orient” that produced inspiration for films such as Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise. In the same breath, it has evoked strong opposition to which the many debates over its controversial legacy can attest. Within intellectual history, scholars have often dismissed it as a pseudo-philosophical system that does nothing to further the leftist genealogies of Luckacs, Adorno, Lenin, Trotsky among others (Alain Badiou proving the lasting exception). These interpretations are justifiably uncomfortable with accounts of lived experience in Maoist China. With all of its controversies, famines, and iconoclasms, it was one of the most sustained experiments in socialism outside of the West. The fact that Maoist thought was enacted on the ground has produced contradictory responses within different contexts: from the romanticization of the “Oriental” struggle, to the hesitation to critically engage with Maoism due to the famines and purges during the period.

However, Chris Connery’s 2007 article, “The World Sixties,” explores Mao’s thought in a global context. He defines “global Maoism” as “a set of dispositions and tendencies that informed political life and liberatory dreams across a broad spectrum.”Footnote ²³ He continues by identifying its various traits: thirdness, theories of contradiction, anti-revisionism, centrality of the peasantry, devaluation of intellectuals, voluntarism, and cultural revolution. These departures, although defamiliarizing for many Western leftists, resonated with the historical circumstances of many actors across the colonized world. Here was a theory of class struggle that was both critical of Europe and did not take it as a primary point of departure. In fact, Maoism was predicated on applying class analysis to the cultural, linguistic, and historical differences of China. With its history of Confucianism, the New Culture Movement of May 4^th, as well as its own anticolonial war against the Japanese, the emergence of Maoism was as complicated and entangled with Chinese intellectual history as it was with the genealogies of European Marxism.Footnote ²⁴ This section cannot pursue an in-depth analysis of each of these differences. However, reading Maoism as integral to Chinese history, rather than a derivative of Western thought, shows why it engaged so many third world actors during the period: these actors often dealt with similar issues of politico-cultural difference.Footnote ²⁵

To sum up, Maoism becomes symbolic through the process of interpretation across a range of global contexts. As such, it is not “Maoism” as it existed in China. Rather, “symbolic Maoism” operates as a series of interpretations or strong misreadings (Bloom) of image (Mao as icon) and text (Maoism as a set of tenets). One example of “symbolic Maoism” is its adoption as the initial cultural platform of the AAWB. Other examples include the referencing of Mao by figures such as Léopold Sédar Senghor, Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, and Ngũgı̃ wa Thiong’o.Footnote ²⁶ To engage with Maoism while thinking through specific projects of national culture does not make these thinkers Maoist, however. Rather, what is at stake is to reread the emergence of postcolonialism through its linkages with the Afro-Asian solidarity movement, and specifically, the encounter with Maoism. Following Jameson then, this article will show how the bureau appropriated “symbolic Maoism” as they formulated their concept of postcolonialism.Footnote ²⁷

AAPSO Cairo, 1957 and the Creation of the Afro-Asian Writers’ Bureau

The Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organization held its first meeting from December 26, 1957, to January 1, 1958, in Cairo, Egypt. More than five hundred delegates from forty-eight different nations were in attendance. In his opening address, the president of the conference, Anwar El Sadat, positioned the AAPSO within the legacy of Bandung. He also engaged with the history of enlightenment thought: “The idea of Afro-Asian Solidarity did not emanate out of naught, so as to be born and see daylight at Bandung all of a sudden. But before materializing as an historical event, it was an impression and an innate volition instinctively developing in the mind of the colonized and the exploited.”Footnote ²⁸ El Sadat interpreted the historical necessity (Jameson) of the AAPSO as rooted in the psychology of colonized subjects and the present possibility of solidarity. He called the colonized a “human being whom imperialism had reduced to a typified specimen of a subjugated species” and “bondsman recognizable in every colonized country.”Footnote ²⁹ In this way, El Sadat responded to the history of enlightenment philosophy and its manifestation in colonial taxonomies. By locating the seeds of resistance in the psyche of the colonized, he endorsed an oppositional politics that was both affective and cultural. He urged for a turn from the struggle exclusively against the colonizer to a relational solidarity between former colonies in order “to meet, to consolidate, [and] to react with one another.”Footnote ³⁰

In response to the imperative of “cultural cooperation,” the AAWB was born. The delegates recommended “the exchange by member nations of scientists, men of letters, artists, students and cultural and educational organizations, as well as the holding of periodical and ad hoc cultural conferences.”Footnote ³¹ At the heart of these “cultural conferences” was the encouragement of “translation to and from the languages of member countries, and the establishment in every member country of a planning body to coordinate the translation movement.”Footnote ³² These global South translation and cultural exchanges would attempt, however briefly, to move the organization past Cold War divisions of American and Soviet blocs. They would also attempt to move past the dichotomy of colonizer and colonized. Although they did not explicitly use the term, the AAWB would conceive of postcolonial literature through a de-emphasis on the colonial dynamic in favor of a commitment to global South vectors of translation and exchange.

Tashkent, 1958, and Third World Literature

The first Afro-Asian Writers’ Conference in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, October 7–13, 1958, took the turn to third-worldism and its relationship to anticolonial struggle into the realm of culture and aesthetics. The role of writers in decolonization and national culture projects dominated the proceedings beginning with the “Appeal to the Writers of the World:”

At Tashkent, world literature was understood as a cultural embodiment of a third world postcolonialism.Footnote ³⁴ Furthermore, its usage serves as an intervention into the typical genealogy of world literature that begins with Goethe’s 1827 coinage of the term Weltliteratur and then moves to discussions of the effects of contemporary globalization on literature.Footnote ³⁵ The AAWB fills in a large gap in this genealogy by providing an alternative literary history rooted in the experience of decolonization, namely, in a “third world literature.” The conference’s definition of third world literature valorized non-Western histories through cultural exchanges and promoted these traditions as examples of humanism. They viewed national cultural movements as a means through which to rehabilitate the category of humanism on a global scale. Frantz Fanon had taken up this notion in his closing speech at the previous AAPSO conference in Cairo in 1957 and later would explore it in depth in The Wretched of the Earth.Footnote ³⁶ Although Aimé Césaire did not participate in the conference, Fanon’s speech, as well as the “Appeal to the Writers to the World,” resonated with his earlier call in Discourse on Colonialism (1955) for “a humanism made to the measure of the world.”Footnote ³⁷

The organization’s cultural exchanges provided a crucible wherein a concept of postcolonialism emerged through discussions on third-worldism, Maoism, pan-Africanism, humanism, world literature, and national culture. The presence of a large Chinese delegation demonstrated the extent to which the PRC sought to present China—much as Zhou Enlai did at Bandung—as a cultural model for the Afro-Asian world. The delegation included Zhou Yang, then vice minister of culture and vice director of the CCP’s Department of Propaganda, and famous writers such as Mao Dun, Ba Jin, and the wife of Lu Xun, Zhu An. For the Chinese delegation, Tashkent was an opportunity for Maoist notions of the role of art and literature to be presented on a global stage. The PRC’s political jockeying that had begun at Bandung had now found its way into the cultural sphere as “literary diplomacy.” As such, two points of discussion that would dominate the conference were issues of language and audience.

With speeches by the Angolan delegate, Mário de Andrade on the politics of language, Efua Sutherland on the status of literature in Ghana, and even W. E. B. Du Bois (whose talk was titled, “I am African, I am American,”), it became clear that the issue of audience lay at the heart of the conference’s agenda. To whom and for whom was the writer supposed to write? What would be the function of ideology in such an aesthetic? And what style of literature did this moment of history demand? De Andrade put it in linguistic terms: “the study of literature in African countries” is suppressed because “African languages are not permitted in any institutions and establishments” due to “the politics of assimilation [that] has expanded everywhere. Because of this, Angola has not been able to put forth in written form our traditional African literature and the rich patrimony of our culture.”Footnote ³⁸ Although referencing the country’s rich tradition of oral literature, de Andrade attacked the colonial hierarchy of language that reflected the power dynamics of colonialism itself. This assertion was provocative within the international framework of Tashkent, which out of necessity took English and French as the primary languages of communication. De Andrade’s desire to validate indigenous languages and narratives within the context of anticolonial struggle put into relief the crisis of representation facing the bureau and its cultural platform.

Although de Andrade succeeded in bringing the question of literature’s audience to the forefront of the conference, it would be the famous Chinese writer Mao Dun who would provide a preliminary answer. The Chinese delegates at Tashkent had left a China in the full throes of the Great Leap Forward. The PRC sought to skip the capitalist stages of industrialization with an emphasis on rural collectivization and the development of agricultural and industrial sectors. Even though in historical retrospect the Great Leap Forward is considered an economic catastrophe, in 1958 delegates viewed it as an alternative path of development. This notion of China as a “third world model” contributed to why Mao Dun’s speech received such an enthusiastic response both during the conference and in the subsequent Soviet press coverage.Footnote ³⁹

In his speech titled “For National Independence, the Undertaking of Humanity’s Progress, and Its Relationship to the Struggle of Chinese Literature,” Mao Dun first gave an outline of the 1919 New Culture Movement of May 4^th in China. He then presented an argument for the role of the writer according to Mao Zedong’s “Talks at the Yenan Forum on Art and Literature.Footnote ⁴⁰ Although already influential in China, Mao Dun’s speech represented the first time Maoist literary theory was promulgated on such a global scale. At Tashkent, the speech would provoke the national imaginations of many writers and intellectuals across the third world. Mao Dun began:

According to Mao Dun, a work of literature had to reflect a “people’s consciousness,” which was assumed to be intrinsically revolutionary. The writer’s role was to tap into this consciousness and awaken it through the imagining of alternatives, which would then bring about a transformation of their environment.Footnote ⁴² The audience for such a literature was not an intellectual elite, but rather the rural peasantry. The writer sought to reflect this “mental outlook” through a shared experience of their quotidian.Footnote ⁴³ This approach would typify the aesthetics of China’s cultural revolution in the next decade. Such a didactic definition of literature meant the writer occupied a privileged position within the hierarchy of cultural struggle. The assertion that the writer must learn from the peasant by going “down to the countryside” produced a tension between a literary elite and an uneducated peasantry.Footnote ⁴⁴ Yet, such a radical shift in audience was a response to de Andrade’s grappling with the politics of language.Footnote ⁴⁵ This focus on the peasantry as source and audience for cultural struggle provided a preliminary answer to Tashkent’s central question concerning the relationship among art, politics, and the role of the writer.

Mao Dun continued with a quote from a Chinese worker: “where there is labor, there is poetry.”Footnote ⁴⁶ This adage brought together and, in so doing, redirected the disparate strands running through the conference. For many delegates, it resonated with the commitment to humanism because it sought to validate the day-to-day culture of the most marginalized figures under colonial rule: the rural peasantry. Although initially Tashkent’s humanism had been associated with an affirmation of cultural difference in the “Appeal,” Mao Dun’s speech lent this humanism a distinctly materialist inflection.Footnote ⁴⁷ Such a materialist turn created a template for a new culture based on factors similar to Jameson’s categories.Footnote ⁴⁸ Because so many delegates were also involved in national liberation movements, this “symbolic Maoism” provided a framework for national culture that emerged out of the immediate context of anticolonialism. Rather than view such an aesthetic as overly determined by politics, which could (and would) asphyxiate cultural production, many of the delegates at Tashkent sought out a definition of culture that took anticolonial struggle as its starting point. This “poetics of labor” provoked the delegates to think according to a “concept of history.” They began to conceive of national culture as a revolutionary practice that would help end the economics of colonialism. Because Mao Dun located this in the “poetics of labor,” the delegates interpreted the speech as an alternative theory of culture based on a stylization for the contemporary moment of struggle.

This concept of history was also based in thinking through the multiple valences of Afro-Asian solidarity. For the AAWB, however, the acuity of the historical moment of decolonization meant their definition of postcolonialism included factors not as prevalent in its later emergence as an academic method. One example is global South vectors of intellectual, cultural, and economic exchange during the Cold War. The importance of Afro-Asian solidarity, however fraught with the parochial national interests of realpolitik, provides an alternative framework to think through issues of postcolonialism that does not rely almost exclusively on a colony’s relationship with the colonial metropole. Specifically, how “symbolic Maoism” functioned within this framework has not been mapped. The goal, however, is not to analyze the controversial Maoist legacy in China. These debates have been had at length in other forums.Footnote ⁴⁹ Rather, this article focuses on how “symbolic Maoism” functioned with a variety of other factors, including pan-Africanism, in the formation of the bureau’s cultural platform.

Although the cultural platform would become more cohesive after the second writers’ conference in Cairo in 1962, the conference at Tashkent had formed criteria that would characterize the bureau’s concept of postcolonialism up through the publication of the second poetry anthology in 1965. These included: the equal importance of cultural struggle along with the political and economic; a privileging of Afro-Asian solidarity over a vertical relationship with the colonial metropole; the third world’s engagement with “symbolic Maoism”; nonalignment; an emphasis on indigenous languages and culture; questions of audience; a commitment to human rights and humanism; and the importance of translation and cultural exchange to formulations of a third world literature. This concept of postcolonialism would serve as a springboard for the delegates’ own national culture projects as well as an inchoate definition of what is now often termed as “alternative modernity.”Footnote ⁵⁰

Awoonor’s African Long March

“Symbolic Maoism” provided an edge to cultural struggle that many writers and intellectuals across Africa found useful in their own articulations of national consciousness. This appropriation was mirrored by Sino-African diplomatic relations itself, which were ratcheted up during the period.Footnote ⁵¹ Moreover, within the historical context of early sixties decolonization—Lumumba’s fall, the ensuing Congo crisis, and the Vietnam War—the bureau provided a forum wherein discussions of the relationship between decolonization and neocolonialism became increasingly acute. In the first part of the anthology published in 1963, there are seventy poems from ten different countries; it is one of the first anthologies of world literature compiled exclusively with non-Western contributions. Although this anthology of third world literature took the bureau’s concept of postcolonialism as its point of departure, it was still published exclusively in English for reasons of expediency and global reach.Footnote ⁵² The first publication included poems from figures such as Patrice Lumumba, as well as the Soviet writer Mirzo Tursun-Zade’s, and the Chinese writer Han Pei-ping’s, imaginaries of Africa. This section will focus on the second volume of the anthology, published in 1965. In particular, it will analyze George Awoonor Williams’s (later Kofi Awoonor) “The Black Eagle Awakens.”Footnote ⁵³

Easily the longest poem in the volume, it reads as a short history of the continent from pre-European contact forward and into the most recent colonial period. Reminiscent of a poetic rendering of Hegel’s master and slave dialectic found in Lumumba’s contributions in the first volume, Awoonor interprets the history of the continent as a history of labor in its various manifestations. He begins with the European encounter where he furthers the common trope of the transatlantic passage: “Splashing through the Atlantic waters/They came to collect black human cargoes./[...]/They took the ship/Their song was/On which shores are we going to land/On which shores?”Footnote ⁵⁴ In the next stanza, he explores earlier histories of labor connected with the continent:

Reminiscent of negritude’s project of cultural inventory, and thereby subject to similar critiques of essentializing a utopian past, Awoonor’s catalogue forges connections between labor and culture. He links the manual work of the pyramids and the construction of the “walls of Zimbabwe” with the cultural work of fashioning the “glory of Mani-Congo” and the “wisdom of Timbuctoo.”Footnote ⁵⁶ The upshot of this coupling is the articulation of a precolonial definition of African civilizations: the industrial developments of bronze working, the engineering feats of the pyramids, the agricultural breakthroughs of animal domestication and farming, and the proliferation of local religions. As such, this first part of Awoonor’s poem can be read as a recuperation of African culture that enacts the bureau’s recuperation of non-Western humanisms. The involvement of African civilizations with the slave trade is glossed over, with Awoonor focusing instead on the protracted conflict of the denial of African dignity: “To them we were the animals of the jungle/To them we were the dregs of humanity.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Awoonor continues with references to the African empires of the Ashanti and Zulu, which were complicated by their own histories of expansion and violence. He then describes an initial throwing back of the European slave trade: “Blood flowed from the great veld/And covered the fields of Chaka’s Kingdom./Osei-tutu’s men rose, fought undauntedly/For four hundred years we fought and won.”Footnote ⁵⁸ This focus on a unified African front against the slave trade elides the historical complicity of African rulers with the transatlantic passage. Yet, the historical narrative Awoonor writes is one of resistance against foreign aggression, which fits within the bureau’s endorsement of a similarly protracted decolonization of the continent during the 1960s.Footnote ⁵⁹

The rest of the poem focuses on the period after the 1885 Berlin conference and the partition stemming from Europe’s “scramble for Africa.” If the previous imperial moment focused on the extraction of African labor during the slave trade, this moment begins with an accusation of duplicity: “Then they came back again offering peace and friendship./We received them in our bounty./But the second slavery had begun./They walked our lands like overlords.”Footnote ⁶⁰ This “second slavery” moves past a fixation with labor as resource, and to the ownership of territory and transformation of culture:

Similar to the disruption of the indigenous cultural logic articulated in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, this second interruption works through a reversal of the moral hierarchy. Christianity is seen as pagan, and it is used to justify the extraction of natural resources. Moreover, Awoonor identifies the tripartite scheme of modern era colonialism: the army, law, and religion. Technological superiority is used as grounds for religious and cultural superiority, resulting in the apparent disintegration of indigenous culture so many of the pan-African intellectuals of the period decried. This unequivocal condemnation will serve as poetic fodder for the following sections, wherein Awoonor moves squarely into the bureau’s appropriation of “symbolic Maoism,” which focuses on the contemporary moment of decolonization.

The next stanza, which lasts the entirety of a page, pulls the poem into the combative realm of anticolonial struggle. Similar to other contributions in the anthology, the stanza literally marshals the drums of war in response to the “blood of martyrs” that should not “be shed in vain.”Footnote ⁶² Awoonor writes that “the tears and moanings have ended/the revolt of slaves had begun” and that “the drums beat again/This time more powerfully/And marshaled forces marched forward/Shaking the sacred earth of Africa.”Footnote ⁶³ As the complexity of the aesthetic becomes sutured to the political message of the poem, Awoonor’s “call to arms” fits precisely into the “symbolic Maoism” of the bureau’s cultural platform during the early 1960s. The emphasis on a unified continent also resonates with the cultural concerns of pan-Africanism. The poem’s militancy not only fits the Maoist definition of revolutionary literature, but also what Fanon would later call a “combat literature” in The Wretched of the Earth.Footnote ⁶⁴

In many ways the poem represents a transition from the negritude of the fifties and to the dominance of a targeted realism during the sixties. If the bureau’s poetry was meant to inspire anticolonialism through its recourse to the dramatization—and often romanticization—of struggle, then the use of realism by many African novelists of the period could also be seen as a revolutionary act.Footnote ⁶⁵ That is, as an aesthetic, realism could provide a critique of the on-the-ground reality of colonialism and thereby did not smack of the conservatism European modernism denounced. Such a complex jumbling of genres within the context of decolonization meant that categories such as realism and modernism were primarily understood via the moment of anticolonial struggle rather than European periodization.Footnote ⁶⁶ In this sense, the bureau endorsed a national modernity that realistically represented the atrocities of colonialism through a romantic push for third world independence. With the bureau’s first anthology, poetry was endorsed as uniquely equipped for the romanticization of this “call-to-arms.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Awoonor’s commitment to the histories of slavery and the “long march” of combat can be read as an attempt to re-periodize the sixties according to the context of global South struggle. This re-periodization is situated at the crossroads of multiple vectors of influence, appropriation, and exchange. Such an act, which took its cues from third world solidarity, pan-Africanism, and “symbolic Maoism,” can be understood as a romanticized, yet entangled move through genre and aesthetics. This movement would form the basis of the bureau’s definition of postcolonialism as a “concept of history.”

The theme of combat continues in the final four stanzas of the poem. Awoonor depicts an African “long march” that sweeps across all corners of the continent. He initially describes the colonizer’s scorn: “And they laughed at us/They said the children of darkness have gone mad,” and with a specific barb at the Afrikaaners, “at sunset they will return to their kraals.”Footnote ⁶⁸ These insults, however, give way to consternation in the face of a marching, pan-African host that

This transnational “long march” mobilizes and brings together the legacies of both Lumumba and Nkrumah. As a possible reference to Lumumba’s “radicalization” at the All African Peoples Conference in Accra in 1958, Awoonor militarizes pan-Africanism within the context of an African socialism. The spear represents the transformation of Marxism in the African context, which encourages solidarity across national lines. This racial and ideological solidarity of the continent extends eastward where the host “rested under the shadow of Kilimanjaro/And the Burning Spear looked into the waters” and later, “Our wing in the north had routed them/And the beloved hills of Algeria are free.”Footnote ⁷⁰ With this description of the extensive wave of decolonization across the continent, Awoonor’s poem is remarkable for its categorical optimism. The complications of an incipient neocolonialism are muted, and the protracted war in Algeria is seen as having already given way to national independence. Moreover, Awoonor does not address the failures of socialism, which would surface on a systemic scale. Instead he situates himself at a moment where the ethical justification for a continued colonialism is no longer tenable. He senses, along with the bureau’s commitment to human rights, that such unbridled optimism is justified because decolonization means a victory for the “right” side of history.

To return to the close reading of the poem that began this article, it is in the penultimate stanza that Awoonor demonstrates his awareness of transcontinental solidarities, even as he remains in a pan-African context. He describes the African host as “gathering for the final assault” because at their “head will be the shade of great Chaka.”Footnote ⁷¹ This diachronic invocation of the controversial leader of the Zulu nation is then coupled with a horizontal, synchronic movement: “Our forces have redoubled/And from distant Asia/Another people whose victory echoes reached us/Have joined our ranks.”Footnote ⁷² This reference to the original “long march” of Mao and the CCP brings the poem to its enactment of Afro-Asian solidarity. For Awoonor, the “long march” of decolonization results in lines of affiliation across the third world. It also means his gesture toward Asia can be understood as an endorsement of Jameson’s “concept of history,” which draws parallels across seemingly disparate contexts. With his conclusion that “our blackness shall redeem us” and finally the repetition of the Swahili term for freedom, “Uruhu! Uruhu! Uruhu!,” Awoonor enacts the categorical optimism of pan-Africanism in that historical moment.Footnote ⁷³ As discussed previously, the realities of an incipient neocolonialism, the specter of Cold War realpolitik embodied by the Sino-Soviet split, as well as the severe limitations of the Maoist model, are not interrogated by Awoonor in his militant exuberance. However critical “revolutionary literature” was of colonialism, it would take another aesthetic to address the antagonisms of the independent nation. That is, as important as “combat literature” was to the birth of the postcolonial, it was not able to address the various entanglements of the postcolony.

Conclusion: Afro-Asian Legacies

Awooner’s optimism now sounds premature given the rise of neocolonialism and the seemingly short-lived nature of these global South exchanges. Furthermore, the AAWB would soon founder upon the realpolitik of the Sino-Soviet split. The bureau would divide in 1966 into a Cairo-based, Soviet-dominated Permanent Bureau of Afro-Asian Writers and a Beijing-based AAWB. Although this first Tashkent incarnation of the bureau would result in a schism, however, it did succeed in bringing many important cultural issues to the table during the high period of 1960s national self-determination. These included: the writer’s relationship to anticolonial politics, decolonization, national modernity, humanism, audience, language, and translation. Also of critical importance was the bureau’s conception of postcolonialism as based in transnational solidarities rather than in an exclusive relationship with the colonial metropole. To return to Jameson, the bureau’s “failure” should thereby be understood through the “unified field theory” of his “concept of history.” Namely, instead of reading the bureau as a failure sequestered off in the far-flung spaces of “Afro-Asia,” it is important to analyze the connections between the cultural work of the bureau and the actual politics of decolonization in many territories across the third world.

Although the Beijing-based bureau would primarily publish the propaganda organ The Call, which would cease publication during the domestic turmoil of China’s Cultural Revolution, the Cairo-based bureau would oversee the founding of Lotus, one of the seminal journals for discussions of what is now considered postcolonialism in the 1970s and 1980s.Footnote ⁷⁴ In fact, the Permanent Bureau in Cairo would succeed in sustaining the global South conversation and exchange that continued up until the very creation of postcolonial studies in the Western academy during the 1980s. Many of the issues that initially concerned the bureau still persist in contemporary discussions of postcolonial literature, world literature, and the relationship between “first” and “third” world cultural production. For example, consider the ongoing debates on the question of audience for many best-selling writers from Africa and Asia. In addition, the concern over the influence of globalization on local aesthetics has informed key concepts such as Orientalism, strategic essentialism, creolization, entanglement, cosmopolitanism, and even the practice of comparison itself. As such, there is the possibility that the history of the Afro-Asian Writers’ Bureau and its later incarnations could provide an as-of-yet unexplored genealogy to the rise of postcolonial studies as an academic discipline.

Finally, there are contemporary parallels within the geopolitical sphere that require a reappraisal of organizations like the AAWB. The rise of China as a world power, the history of which is partly rooted in forums such as the AAPSO, means that rereading these Cold War global South exchanges could help contextualize current trends in globalization and geopolitics. “Symbolic Maoism,” which provided much of the ideological spark for the bureau’s cultural platform during the sixties, has given way to the “capitalism with Chinese characteristics” that now dominates the current global economic landscape. Specifically, China’s controversial presence in Africa should be properly historicized as not just a brand new economic phenomenon linked to the increasing multipolarity of geopolitics, but rather as also a phenomenon that mobilizes the political and cultural rhetoric of friendship and solidarity of the Cold War period. This multifaceted approach would allow for a comprehensive mapping, one which takes into account these failures and successes—as well as their contestations—in order to create a “concept of history” for not only the previous, but also contemporary moment.