The Lost Archive of Liberation: Lotus and the Palestinian Place in Afro-Asian Internationalism

• In Event: Recovering the Third World Studies Project: Towards New Visions of Anti-Imperial Pedagogies & Global Solidarities

Abstract

Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings was a landmark experiment in revolutionary literary internationalism—a tri-lingual journal (Arabic, English, and French) that emerged in 1968 from Cairo, and later Beirut and Tunis, under the auspices of the Afro-Asian Writers’ Bureau (AAWB), the cultural arm of the Bandung movement. Through Lotus, writers and artists from formerly colonized nations forged an aesthetic and political alliance against imperialism, Zionism, and global apartheid. Palestinian poets and intellectuals—including Ghassan Kanafani, Mahmoud Darwish, Mu’in Bseiso, Tawfiq Zayyad, and Samih al-Qassim—were central to this project, shaping the discourse of “resistance literature” (adab al-muqāwama) as a vital site in the global struggle against colonialism, capitalist imperialism, and racism. The journal’s pages also hosted figures such as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Nazim Hikmet, Faiz Ahmad Faiz, and Alex La Guma, whose writings articulated an insurgent humanism rooted in decolonization and Third World solidarity.
In 1977, following Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s normalization with Israel, Lotus relocated from Cairo to Beirut, moving into the offices of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)—a powerful symbolic act of anti-colonial refusal and solidarity. Under the editorship of Mu’in Bseiso and Faiz Ahmad Faiz, the journal became a cultural organ of revolutionary internationalism. Beirut in the 1970s was the “Arab Hanoi” (Maasri, 2020) which became a hub for liberation movements, where Lotus operated as both archive and amplifier of global struggles for self-determination. Despite its historical significance, scholarly literature on Lotus and the AAWB (Halim 2012; Azeb 2011; Djagalov 2020; Popescu 2020; Lee 2010; Yoon 2015) has largely overlooked the pivotal pedagogical role of Palestine and Palestinian cultural producers within these networks. This paper reconstructs that history, arguing that Palestinian revolutionaries not only contributed to Lotus but helped redefine its political and aesthetic mission, transforming the Afro-Asian cultural front into a site of praxis that linked resistance literature, anti-colonial radicalism, and international solidarity.
Revisiting Lotus in the present moment of genocide in Gaza reveals what has been lost with the dismantling of these anti-colonial third world infrastructures of cultural collaboration. The destruction of Gaza’s universities, archives, and intellectual life—the ongoing scholasticide—exposes the absence of the kinds of internationalist institutions and solidarities that Lotus once sustained. Recovering Lotus is thus not an act of nostalgia but of political urgency: it reminds us that anti-colonial cultural networks once formed a living system of mutual defense against annihilation. In the ruins of Gaza’s scholasticide, remembering Lotus allows us to imagine how anti-colonial thought, art, literature, and solidarity can again function as infrastructures of collective survival.

Author

• Chandni Desai, University of Toronto