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

Abstract

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.

Keywords:

• Afro-Asian internationalism
• Bandung
• Lotus
• modernity
• philosophy and theory of culture

Acknowledgments

An early draft of this essay was presented at the Axis of Solidarity: Landmarks, Platforms, Futures conference in London. I am grateful for the feedback provided by the audience and the organizers; with special thanks to Salah M. Hassan for his generous engagement with this essay. I am also grateful for Siba Grovogui’s guidance on how to think about and with Bandung, and the helpful comments provided by two anonymous reviewers for Interventions.

Notes

1 Lotus essentially did not publish on Chinese related topics. The Sino-Soviet split clearly influenced the purview of Lotus.

2 In many respects the Cairo-based Permanent Bureau was able to have a significant influence on the nature of the cultural material circulated in the Soviet Union from the 1970s onwards; Soviet publishing houses were putting out hundreds of titles by Afro-Asian writers (Yashen 1971).

3 Whenever I have been able to locate Arabic issues of Lotus, I have translated directly from the Arabic version of the article (if the article was originally written in Arabic). However, I frequently had to resort to the English translations of the published issues due to an inability to locate the corresponding Arabic issues.

4 For an analysis of the Egyptian Nasserist project from this perspective, see Salem (2018).

5 An accidental property of a thing is a property that a thing has but need not have in order to be the thing that it is. See the overview in Robertson and Atkins (2016).

6 Nonetheless, one must concur with Halim’s judgment that explicit references to Fanon are relatively rare in the pages of Lotus (Halim 2012, 580). Aside from the two references which Halim has uncovered, I have only been able to find references to Fanon’s work in Joseph Ki-Zerbo’s article. This is a phenomenon that requires explanation, but that is beyond the scope of my discussion.

7 Amin is not claiming that prior to modernity people did not make their own history. He is only claiming that prior to modernity people did not consciously think of themselves as makers of their own history: “This [the belief that humans are makers of their own history] marks a break with the dominant philosophy of all previous societies, both in Europe and elsewhere, based on the principle that God, having created the universe and mankind, is the ‘legislator’ of last resort” (2009, 13). The same point is also made by Quijano (2000, 547).

8 After the 1973 war, most African countries severed ties with Israel (Oded 2010). This was quite a significant development given that in the 1960s Israel had diplomatic relations with almost all of the independent African countries. In 1967 Guinea (Conakry) became the first non-Arab African country to sever diplomatic ties with Israel.

9 For an account of the military assistance offered by Apartheid South Africa to the Portuguese in Mozambique, and of Israeli military support for Apartheid South Africa, see Husain (1982).

10 In his report on the Bandung Conference, Wright states that if “the men of the West were political animals, then the men of the East were religious animals” (2008, 491). Hence, Wright ascribed a unity to the peoples of Africa and Asia, but it was based on the idea that they were all dominated by a specific kind of religiosity that obliterated all other aspects of cultural and social life: “a passionate unyielding religion, feeding on itself, sufficient unto itself” (489). Contrary to what Wright asserts, the unity among the formerly colonized peoples as it manifested itself in the Third World as a project was essentially political (Prashad 2007, 34).

11 The similarity of their struggles could also often lead to stylistic similarities in the works of art they produced. For instance, Barry Feinberg points out that when he showed some South African poetry to a Palestinian poet (unnamed by him), the latter was struck by the stylistic similarities to the Palestinian poetry he was acquainted with (Feinberg 1974, 10).

12 Dehni (1974, 157) makes a similar point about the influence of the struggle against colonialism and oppression on the development of the philosophical attitude (and implicitly the epistemic standpoint) of the Arab writer.

13 Although I use the word “European” in this context, Afro-Asian writers recognized that Europe was not a monolith and there were regions counted as European but which were marginalized within Europe (El Sebai 1971).

14 However, the historical-materialist orientation they adopted was not based on the thesis that there existed a kind of one-to-one correspondence between works of art and economic structures, i.e., that every work of art was a direct expression of the economic structure of society. For a detailed critique of “vulgar” versions of historical-materialist approaches to art and art history, see Shukri (1970).

15 The idea that the Marxist project is essentially the attempt to bring about a “dialectical” return to pre-capitalist social formations is not uncommon among some Marxists, specifically those who place emphasis on Marx’s Ethnological Notebooks (e.g., Gailey 2006).

16 Goethe makes a similar point in the first part of Faust: “Was du ererbt von deinen Vätern hast, Erwirb es, um es zubesitzen” (1986, I, 682/3). The point is that one must labor in order to make one’s inheritance one’s own.

17 The view that the preservation of tradition is essentially a creative activity was also articulated by Ritkheou (1977) in relation to his own Chukchi culture.

18 This modernist approach to tradition is also evident in Cabral’s work: “we want, therefore, to destroy everything that would be an obstacle to the progress of our people, all relations that there are in our society (in Guinea and Cape Verde), be they against the progress of our people or against the liberty of our people”. (2016, 77)

19 See also Cabral’s (1979) discussion and critique of this depiction of the colonized people in colonialist thought.