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Find out about the Afro-Asian archives, Lotus magazine and cultural solidarity and resistance in the Cold War. In this panel moderated by Vijay Prashad, Reem Abou-El-Fadl, Anaheed Al-Hardan and Tariq Mehmood discuss their research on the Afro-Asian Writers’ Association which was formed in 1958 in Tashkent to cultivate anti-colonial solidarity through literature and culture. The speakers will discuss this and other organisations and publications which set out to build cultural resistance. They will look at sociological and political perspectives on the influential Lotus Magazine, which was published by the association from Cairo and Beirut.

Further reading & listening

Afro-Asian Solidarity before AAPSO: The African Association in Cairo by Reem Abou-El-Fadl
Beyond Pan-Arabism: Suez and Afro-Asian Solidarity in Abdel Nasser’s Egypt by Reem Abou-El-Fadl
Interview about the decolonisation and non-aligned movements on Professors at Work (Spotify) by Anaheed Al-Hardan

About the speakers

Reem Abou-El-Fadl is Senior Lecturer in Comparative Politics of the Middle East at SOAS University of London. She is interested in the politics of solidarity across the Arab world and is currently researching the intersections of pan-Arabism and Afro-Asianism in Egypt. More about Reem Abou-El-Fadl

Anaheed Al-Hardan is Assistant Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Media Studies at the American University of Beirut where she is principal investigator of the project Afro-Asian Futures Past. More about Anaheed Al-Hardan.

Tariq Mehmood is a writer and filmmaker. He is Associate Professor at the American University Beirut and currently completing his first book on the Lotus project: The Poetry of Lotus and the Afro-Asian Writers Movement. More about Tariq Mehmood

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian and journalist. He is the author of thirty books, including Red Star Over the Third World, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World and The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South. More about Vijay Prashad

Image 1: Front Cover, Proceedings of the inagural Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Conference, Cairo, 26 Dec 1957–1 Jan 1958, Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1958. Courtesy of Reem Abou-El-Fadl.
Image 2: Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Organization, 1976. Courtesy of Anaheed Al-Hardan