Teaching Lotus
Teaching Lotus
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Journal Referenced
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14 September 2023
This teaching tool discusses the relevance of the journal Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings, a trilingual (Arabic, English, French) quarterly published by the Afro-Asian Writers Association from 1968 to 1991, for the development of critical and anticolonial pedagogies. Lotus embodied a project of intellectual, political, and aesthetic internationalism, which promoted solidarity as an editorial praxis, debated it theoretically, and textualized it as genre and form. Therefore, Lotus offers students and educators a vast archive to analyse the relationship between anticolonial scholarship, anticolonial creativity, and anticolonial militancy in the Global South.
Lotus: A Short Background
Lotus and Contemporary Struggles
Teaching Resources
Pedagogy and Anti-colonial Cultural Production
Comparison, Language and Translation
Lotus: A Short Background
The 1955 Bandung conference is a watershed in the history of the twentieth century. It established a network of political infrastructures not only for non-aligned states in the context of the Cold War, but also for anticolonial and antiracist social movements. One of the organisations that emerged out of Bandung was the Afro-Asian Writers’ Association, which gathered editors, writers, illustrators, intellectuals, and translators. The Afro-Asian Writers’ Association was established in 1958 at the conference of Afro-Asian Writers in Tashkent, Uzbekistan where a resolution was passed to launch a Permanent Bureau of Afro-Asian Writers. The latter was first based in Colombo and then relocated to Cairo in the 1960s, where it remained headquartered until the late 1970s. The journal left Egypt for Beirut in the context of the Arab boycott of Egypt following the 1978 Camp David Accords and the assassination, in the same year, of writer and Lotus editor-in-chief Yusuf Sibai. It would relocate again, this time to Tunis, following the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and was later discontinued in the early 1990s after the fall of the Soviet Union, which had provided the bulk of funding for the journal’s operations. There have been recent attempts to revive Lotus in the 2010s, but with mixed success.
Lotus provided the means for cultural producers across anticolonial struggles to share knowledge, theorise, and build relations. The journal came out with the same content in three versions, one in Arabic, one in French, and one in English. It therefore involved an extensive team of translators, able to work multilingually across European, African, and Asian languages. The Arabic edition was printed in Cairo, while the French and the English in Eastern Germany. With the exception of some bookstores, the readership was mostly by subscription. Issues of the magazine ranged between 80 and 150 pages, and were richly illustrated throughout. The content included a variety of genres, from academic essays to poems, from transcriptions of important speeches to political manifestos, from short stories to conference motions and resolutions, from readers’ letters to reports on important world events. Contributors were generally referred to by their name and country of origin, with short bios at the end of every issue. Reading through these bios gives a sense of the breadth of the Lotus geography: the first issue, for example, includes contributions from Indonesia, Ghana, Algeria, South Africa, Japan, Iraq, Pakistan, Senegal, Guinea, India, Lebanon, Madagascar, Ivory Coast, Turkey, the then-Dahomey (now Benin), and the then-United Arab Republic (Egypt). Its pages featured prominent anti-colonial authors, such as Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Gabriel Okara, Alex La Guma, Mulk Anand Raj, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Ghassan Kanafani, and Mahmoud Darwish, among others. 1Lotus and its afterlives: Memory, pedagogy and anticolonial solidarity, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03626784.2022.2072670 Indeed, Halim has argued that “Lotus represents a decidedly anti-Eurocentric project of comparatism that also compels attention by virtue of being a supranational/internationalist one” (p. 565).
We approach this project with a clear awareness of the intricate interplay between state and non-state actors within the journal. The Bandung process itself was a complex endeavour, serving as both a push against imperialist powers, but also a defensive stance against domestic opponents. As always funding is important to such projects of cultural production. Being based in Cairo, Lotus had to navigate the dynamics and alliances of the Cold War era while receiving funding from state actors. To grasp the tensions surrounding revolutionary internationalism, solidarity, and anti-imperialist politics in the broader context of Cold War politics, a critical analysis of the journal is imperative. Nonetheless, the journal’s pages provide a crucial space for delving into and retelling histories of solidarity often overlooked in humanities and social sciences curricula, which tend to focus on elite politics alone.
The movement of Lotus itself, through its various relocations, reveals a compelling narrative about the political landscape, shifting alliances, and the emergence of new centres of internationalist solidarity. One significant move occurred when Lotus shifted from Cairo to Beirut. This move was triggered by the Sadat regime’s decision to normalise relations with Israel, marked by Sadat’s visit to Israel in 1977, which dramatically altered Cairo’s stance on the Palestinian issue. Consequently, Cairo lost its status as a critical hub for Afro-Asian solidarity, facing boycotts, and prompting the relocation of the journal’s production to Beirut.
This move was a powerful political and cultural statement against Sadat’s trajectory.
The decision to move Lotus to the offices of the Palestinian Liberation Organization in Beirut underscores the centrality of the Palestinian cause within anti-colonial networks at that time. Beirut assumed the role of replacing Cairo as an incubator of anti-colonial networks and a haven for dissenting voices. During its Beirut years, Lotus saw Pakistani revolutionary poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz assuming the editorship, while Palestinian Muin Bseiso took over the editorship of the Arabic section, succeeding the late Yousef El-Sebai, who had been assassinated in Cyprus in 1978 while serving as minister of culture under Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt.
The influence of Palestinian figures such as Mahmood Darwish and Muin Bseiso significantly impacted Lotus during its Beirut phase. Additionally, Faiz’s meeting with Palestinian intellectual Edward Said, facilitated by their mutual friend Eqbal Ahmad, strengthened the connections among revolutionary poets and intellectuals dispersed across various exiles. These connections played a vital role in shaping Lotus’ trajectory and fostering networks of scholars, literary authors, and activists. Following Israel’s invasion of Beirut in 1982, the journal once again relocated, this time to Tunisia, following the Palestinian editors who were responsible for its production at that time.
- Lotus and its afterlives: Memory, pedagogy and anticolonial solidarity, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03626784.2022.2072670→
Recording Solidarity
Lotus also kept readers informed of international meetings between writers and featured speeches delivered by delegates.
Layout of Lotus
Lotus made the works of several continents and nations visible to each other as well as the globe through its concerted effort to translate works for its Arabic readers, and to English and French for Asian and African readers.
The impulse was to reorient intercultural dialogue and cultural production from the metropole-colony, to one between the colonised. Literary and visual artistic expressions would feature the artists’ name and country of origin, making the magazine an explicitly international anthology of works that would sit side by side.
Tashkent Conference
Third World print culture developed immensely through a series of conferences between delegates from the Global South. Known as the ‘Bandung era’ from the landmark 1955
Asian-African Bandung Conference which saw the formation of Afro-Asian Writers Bureau and their first meeting at the 1958 Tashkent Conference, Lotus emerged out of these networks.
Formed at the Tashkent conference, the Afro-Asian Writers Association (AWWA) would issue the journal. The Afro-Asian Writers’ Conferences also acted as a political forum, promoted translation efforts of literary works and planned speaking tours for visiting writers.
Lotus and Contemporary Struggles
Our project used an interdisciplinary lens to examine Lotus, combining an attention to text and aesthetics with an analysis of the broader politics of cultural production. In so doing, it proposed to look at cultural production as an integral part of global political trends and histories of development and underdevelopment. Lotus is also a useful source to think about literary production in conjunction with the visual arts, as the design of the issues and the illustrations were an integral part of the political vision of the Afro-Asian Writers’ Association.
The project also emerged in dialogue with similar initiatives internationally among scholars invested in producing anti-racist curricula and working with anti-colonial archives. For example, we established direct links with the Critical Studies in Equity and Solidarity program at the University of Toronto and the “Transnational Cultural Solidarities: Afro-Asian Pasts, Present, and Futures” project. We followed the ongoing initiative at the American University of Beirut that “aims at documenting and examining the legacy, impact and current relevance of the works of the anti-colonial writers of the Afro-Asian Writer’s Association (AAWA) and their journal Lotus”. We were also inspired by the work on the Revolutionary Papers project, an international, transdisciplinary research and teaching initiative on anticolonial, anti-imperial, and related left periodicals of the Global South.
In starting with Lotus, we aimed at centring student voices in discussions of pedagogy. Working with students we asked them to reflect critically on their time at KCL, both within the classroom and in the broader institution. Students produced short reports of their own experiences, identifying what they felt was empowering and disempowering about their modules and their interaction with teachers, other students, and larger KCL structures and services (like decolonising initiatives, Student Union, counselling services, Student Staff Liaison Committees). Students reflected on what was considered ‘authoritative knowledge’ in various modules versus what concepts, experiences and voices were marginalised. Overall, there was a sense that race and racialisation, colonialism, anticolonial and antiracist organising were not adequately attended to in the classroom.
The second step entailed sharing the Lotus archive with the students, and encouraging them to think creatively about its history and content outside of the academic structures of established assessment patterns and classroom methods. This produced a wealth of original ideas that stressed underexplored aspects of the archive, such as its visuals and illustrations, and added new multimedia initiatives on the topics of antiracism and anticolonialism. The students engaged with Lotus in multiple ways, producing personal reflections, exhibition, a music playlist, and a zine. As a final step, we invited students to think about how Lotus can inspire a pedagogical reorientation that furthers inclusivity and equality. Students proposed new classroom strategies, and in so doing became themselves agents of their own potential learning. The project also problematised some of the limits of knowledge production in present-day academia, where many research outputs are published behind paywalls, or use technical jargon that is only accessible to specialists. Against this gatekeeping of knowledge, we collectively agreed that our project would attempt to spread information on the relevance of Lotus to larger audiences. The plan to design an exhibition open to a larger public, at KCL and beyond, derives from these discussions about the ways that knowledge production, accessibility, and inclusivity go hand in hand.
Importantly, students began to make connections between writing in Lotus and contemporary social movements and questions of social justice. In selecting materials for the exhibition, students were keen to connect articles in Lotus around the death of Martin Luther King for example, with the demands of the contemporary Black Live Matter movement. In this sense, Lotus was not discussed as a self-enclosed archive that belongs to a foregone past, but as an open-ended repository of collective knowledge production.
The struggle of the Black Power movement in the USA also featured in Lotus. Though based in the Global North, the feature demonstrated the recognition of marginalised groups that exceeded borders and emphasised the politics of solidarity. Recent movements under the ‘Black Lives Matter’ banner continue to emphasise black liberatory struggles.
Focus on gender and women’s liberatory movements became feature pieces of Lotus, a call for recognition and advancement reflected in movements today. The mentions of women’s liberation as tied to national liberation in some occasional pieces may reflect the ongoing challenges for women’s liberatory movements today.
Posters
Teaching Resources
Recognising significant inequalities that impact students differentially, inclusive pedagogy aims to establish different ‘entry points’ for students, engaging them in multiple ways. Cultural production generally, and Lotus specifically, can be a useful source for alternative materials in the classroom that presents understudied histories of colonisation and Afro-Asian solidarity. It also gives students the experience of working with non-academic materials and formats, responding to them creatively.
In discussions with students, they proposed that Lotus can be used in interesting ways within and outside the classroom to generate discussions and debate. Using extracts from Lotus, students are assigned to groups, each reading a Lotus editorial. Each group can facilitate a discussion around the period the editorial was written and what was shaping the politics of that moment. Students can then write a short reflective piece discussing the key themes. Working in pairs students are asked to write a short creative response to an article or editorial in Lotus, establishing links with contemporary social movements. The writing can take various formats, including a blog or a zine – or students can propose alternative formats like podcasts or interviews.
The visual element within Lotus can also be drawn upon by giving students space to create drawings or photographs that are inspired by the writings and images in Lotus. Those creative activities can also be used in times of global unrest, where the students could be asked to respond to those events through visual arts. Music can also be good way to engage students in the topics at hand. It provides a sensory experience that is often more stimulating for students, especially neurodivergent students. For example, KCL’s ‘Afrofuturism’ module allows for students to have the option of creating a digital mixtape based on the module topics.
Proposed discussion points include:
- Explore the concept of ‘national literature’ and ‘nation’: What do you think of as ‘national literature’ and ‘nation’?
- What are the problems and avenues opened by applying the lens of the ‘national’ to literature?
- How was Afro-Asian solidarity conceived during the founding of Lotus?
- Is the concept of such solidarity relevant today to issues of International Development?
- Writers in Lotus disrupted the idea of a Western literary canon.
- What kind of knowledge is being produced by the different works in Lotus?
- How does Lotus respond to the world around, cross-culturally? How do these responses relate to contemporary events?
Lotus can help us with broader conversations about remembering, re-telling, and teaching with anti-colonial archives of Afro-Asian solidarity. What can Lotus, as an understudied archive, tell us about anti-colonial cultural production, solidarity as praxis, and contemporary discussions around decolonising the curriculum?
Lotus Reading Guide
Lotus was available to access through writers’ unions, library subscriptions, some bookstores in African and Asian countries and individual subscriptions. Lotus was widely circulated through different geographies, debated, and discussed, yet there remains very little scholarly attention around its origins, impact, and the forms of solidarity it aspired to engender.
EL NABOLSY, Zeyad. “Lotus and the Self-Representation of Afro-Asian Writers as the Vanguard of Modernity”, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, vol. 23, no. 4, 2021, pp. 596-620.
HALIM, Hala. “Lotus, the Afro-Asian Nexus, and Global South Comparatism”, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, vol. 32, no. 3, 2012, pp. 563–583.
HALIM, Hala. “Translating Solidarity: An Interview with Nehad Salem”, Critical Times, vol. 3, no. 1, 2020, pp. 131–147.
HALIM, Hala. “The pre-postcolonial and its enduring relevance: Afro-Asian variations in Edwar al-Kharrat’s texts”, in Monika Albrecht (ed.), Postcolonialism Cross-Examined: Multidirectional Perspectives on Imperial and Colonial Pasts and the Neocolonial Present, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 79-96.
HOLT, Elizabeth M. “Cairo and the cultural cold war for Afro-Asia”, in Chen Jian, Martin Klimke, Masha Kirasirova, Mary Nolan, Marilyn Young, Joanna Waley-Cohen (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of the Global Sixties: Between Protest and Nation-Building, London and New York: Routledge, 2018, pp. 480-493.
HOLT, Elizabeth M. “Al-Tayyib Sālih’s Season of Migration to the North, the CIA, and the Cultural Cold War after Bandung”, Research in African Literatures, vol. 50 no. 3, 2019, p. 70-90.
KALLINEY, Peter. “Exceptionalism and Anticolonial Writing: The Afro-Asian Movement and Its Forerunners”, PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, vol. 137, no. 1, 2022, pp. 155-162.
KWAK, Hyoungduck, “The Afro-Asian Writers Association and a Reimagining of Japan: Intersection of Imperialism and Nationalism”, Seoul Journal of Japanese Studies, vol.4, no.1, 2018, pp. 199-220.
LEWIS, Su Lin and Carolien STOLTE. “Other Bandungs: Afro-Asian Internationalisms in the Early Cold War”, Journal of World History, vol. 30, no. 1, 2019, pp. 1-19.
MAKINO, Kumiko. “Afro-Asian Solidarity and the Anti-Apartheid Movement in Japan”, in Anna Konieczna and Rob Skinner (eds.), A Global History of Anti-Apartheid: ‘Forward to Freedom’ in South Africa, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, pp 265–287.
POPESCU, Monica. “Afro-Asian Internationalism: Leftist Solidarities during the Cold War”, PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, vol. 136, no. 5, 2021, pp. 800–808.23
SCHULZE-ENGLER, Frank. “Entangled Solidarities: African–Asian Writers’ Organisations, Anti-colonial Rhetorics and Afrasian Imaginaries in East African Literature”, in Ross Anthony and Uta Ruppert (eds.), Reconfiguring Transregionalisation in the Global South: African-Asian Encounters, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, pp. 117–139.
STOLTE, Carolien. “Introduction: Trade Union Networks and the Politics of Expertise in an Age of Afro-Asian Solidarity”, Journal of Social History, vol. 53, no. 2, 2019, pp. 331 347.
VANHOVE, Peter. “‘A world to win’: China, the Afro-Asian Writers’ Bureau, and the Reinvention of World Literature”, Critical Asian Studies, vol. 51, no. 2, 2019, pp. 144 165.
YOON, Duncan M. “‘Our Forces Have Redoubled’: World Literature, Postcolonialism, and the Afro-Asian Writers’ Bureau”, Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, vol. 2, no. 2, 2015, pp. 233–252.
Pedagogy and Anti-colonial Cultural Production
Pedagogically, we found that the engagement with art and literature generates a thoughtful consideration of the legacies of colonialism and the yet unfinished project of decolonisation. The use of cultural products as primary source opened up an important space for students to reflect on the historical debates around the relationship of literature/language and decolonisation, as well as the place of art in national liberation struggles and in questions of development and underdevelopment. In other words, working directly with literature, poetry, and visual arts helped to present students with a more nuanced understanding around issues of colonialism and neo-colonialism.
Students were not just asked to document the history of Lotus, but to actively contribute to shaping the journal’s legacy and to participate in the journal’s political project. One student proposed to create a music playlist that included both political songs from the time of Lotus’s publication (1960s and 1970s) and the present. Another proposed to create a zine, on the model of the zines produced by student movements and radical groups of the time of Lotus. Students independently selected the pages and illustrations of Lotus to include in the exhibition and grouped them under thematic rubrics. The possibility to engage creatively with the archive improved student engagement and could serve as a model for new assessment methods in the classroom. Students could be asked to produce musical, literary, or visual outputs through which to relate their own ideas and experiences to older histories of activism and international solidarity.
For International Development students, cultural production was a new medium through which to examine transnational mobilisation, political thought, and solidarity activism. Students in English and Comparative Literature were encouraged to look at literature as a form of counter-hegemonic worldmaking. Hala Halim has argued that Lotus is a crucial stepping stone in the development of Comparative Literature as a discipline, as it puts different languages, authors and cultural traditions in dialogue through translations, conferences, and an international infrastructure for circulation and distribution.
Lotus Covers
A notable feature of the Lotus magazine relates to its front cover illustrations. With every issue, the magazine featured the visual art or architecture from a national culture. The following introductory page would also include details on the originating nation. In this way, the front covers of Lotus worked to the same effect of the translated literary pieces, both decolonising the global literary culture and making cultural productions of the Global South accessible in a global format.
Comparison, Language and Translation
The Lotus editorial board did not draw together multilingual contributions from all over two continents out of a mere anthological impulse. Rather, the geographical coverage of the journal was premised on the awareness that all anticolonial struggles were connected, in so far as they all opposed the same oppressive politico-economic structures. The structural nature of colonial and racist violence is required to think and act comparatively, across many languages and literary traditions. For the editors and writers of Lotus, the act of comparison is what established the infrastructure of solidarity in the first instance. This has important consequences for students of comparative literature, as it recasts comparison as mutual commitment to joint liberation, and as a tool of multilingual and transnational mobilisation.
Translation played a key role in this politics of comparison. Although the three languages selected for publication inevitably enacted their own exclusions, the decision to publish Lotus multilingually placed language learning at the core of the internationalist ethos promoted by the AAWA. This commitment is significant given in the face of the complex organisational challenged posed by the number of translations needed to publish each issue in English, French and Arabic. As a transnational, trilingual periodical, Lotus was produced by a large team of diverse collaborators who worked with different languages and across far-flung geographies. The collaborative labour that was required to sustain the publication of the magazine was in itself a laboratory of how to enact relationships of mutual solidarity.
In the classroom, this can prompt reflections about the privileging of competitive over collaborative forms of knowledge production in the neoliberal university, and about the value of restoring forms of participatory knowledge co-creation. Classroom instructors can develop collaborative pedagogical approaches starting from the multilingual character of Lotus. The student body at King’s College London is incredibly diverse, with many international students as well as many second-generation British students. These students are often bilingual, and sometimes even tri- or quadrilingual, but this language expertise is rarely valorised in the classroom. Students whose native language is not English sometimes struggle in keeping up with the discussion in seminars and need practice to articulate their thoughts orally and in writing. Students who speak another language at home often feel like their family language does not matter academically, and does not have intellectual or artistic value in the UK. This means English can be experienced in the classroom as an alienating language, disconnected from the student’s affective and private life.
While the use of English in the classroom is pragmatically unavoidable, Lotus can be used to valorise the varied linguistic expertise that students bring to the classroom. Students could be asked to read the English, French or Arabic edition of the same issue depending on their linguistic skillset, and could then team up and compare the translations. Students who do not speak French or Arabic could be asked to track down the Hindi, Portuguese, Turkish, Chinese (and so on) original of the literary text published in Lotus, or to relate the English, French or Arabic contributions to Lotus with the writers’ literary production in other languages. This exercise will allow non-native speakers to bring their expertise to bear on their academic work, denaturalising English as the default academic language and establishing a multilingual dialogue in the classroom where each student can make their language skills count. Students who only speak English could also become more attuned to the nuances of translating from and into other languages, and could learn to look at English more comparatively as one of the many literary and scholarly language in which anticolonial and antiracist political projects were articulated in the past and in the present.
Teaching Lotus
This teaching tool discusses the relevance of the journal Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings, a trilingual (Arabic, English, French) quarterly published by the Afro-Asian Writers Association from 1968 to 1991, for the development of critical and anticolonial pedagogies. Lotus embodied a project of intellectual, political, and aesthetic internationalism, which promoted solidarity as an editorial praxis, debated it theoretically, and textualized it as genre and form. Therefore, Lotus offers students and educators a vast archive to analyse the relationship between anticolonial scholarship, anticolonial creativity, and anticolonial militancy in the Global South.
This teaching tool is the outcome of a collaborative project at King’s College London. We worked closely with students from the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, as well as the Department of International Development to explore how pedagogy can be imagined differently if we start from anticolonial archives. Together with students, we examined how we can effectively utilise the literary and artistic archives of Afro-Asian solidarity to challenge historical and present colonial structures and racial discrimination.
This teaching tool sets out the key findings from the project and provides some suggestions of specific ways Lotus may be used in the classroom. The images throughout this teaching tool are from the poster exhibition created by the students and graphic designer Toka Alhamazawey as part of the project, and which was on display at King’s College London from the 6th to the 14th of October 2022. Our aim is for this teaching tool to facilitate conversations about the enduring legacies of colonialism and racism, while also shedding light on how movements for justice have envisioned and strived to build a better world.