Research

In Preparation

Seeking an Afro-Asian Socialist Aesthetic: Notes from the Lotus archive (1967-82)

This paper is situated in the recent turn to the archives of the high point of decolonization (1950s and 60s) in order to reassess their critical insights on resistance politics and literature as well as their lasting impact on ethnic studies (Lye 2008) and the imbrications of postsocialism and postcolonialism (Shih 2012). Recent anthropological scholarship has underscored how the possibility of a political socialist critique from within postcolonial studies had been foreclosed by growing frustrations with “the confident functionalism of the 1970s Marxist peasant studies” and the violence of totalitarian socialist regimes (Chari and Verdery 2007). However, the utopian dream of an Afro-Asian socialism uncircumscribed by colonial and imperial histories had galvanized an entire generation of anticolonial writers and activists. The promising Third-worldism of the Afro-Asian as a political alliance has been the subject of a lot of scholarly inquiry (Prashad 2007, Lee 2010, Engermenn 2011). However, the critical attention to this movement’s prodigious literary and cultural archive has been rather scant (Halim 2012, Djagalov 2018). This paper contributes to the growing scholarship addressing this gap by turning to the archives of the Afro-Asian Writers’ Association (AAWA).

Formed in Tashkent at the inaugural conference of the Afro-Asian Writers’ Movement in 1958, the AAWA tasked itself with the goal of “cultural decolonization” and established a Permanent Bureau of Writers. Among other things, the Bureau was to publish a journal that would serve as a platform for bringing together diverse literatures from the newly independent nations of the two continents. Ten years later, in 1968, the first issue of Lotus: Journal of Afro-Asian Writing was published from Cairo. This tri-lingual magazine that ran from 1967 to 1991 was an ambitious project, styling itself as a “militant” publication invested in opposing “cultural imperialism” and inaugurating a new era of modern and revolutionary literature. Through an analysis of select issues of the journal, I elucidate the schema of this decentered and decolonized literary aesthetic.

At first glance, the hefty discourse produced around prescriptions for what this literature should be appears to be heavily circumscribed within the modernizing teleologies of the anti-colonial socialism of the age. However, the formulaic language of the editorials was often undercut by the complex negotiations in the studies and literatures published about what exactly this new literary ethos was as well as the sheer heterogeneity of languages, genres, and political sensibilities held together under the journal’s banner. Further, in rendering this Afro-Asian poetic available to its readers, the AAWA institutionalized translation processes through setting up bureaus and specific officers for the task. However, it remained largely silent about the logistics of translation and tended to invisibilize complex linguistic and generic negotiations in order to render vernacular idioms into an intelligible internationalism. By analyzing literary and editorial works by writers such as Faiz Ahmed Faiz (Pakistan), Adonis (Syria), and Ousmane Sembène (Senegal), I demonstrate how the category of a modern revolutionary Afro-Asian literature was not static, as has often been assumed, but was discursively produced and constantly deliberated upon throughout the journal’s phenomenal three decade-run. I conclude that the present-day resurgence of conservative regimes and as well as the promise of socialist alternatives necessitates an engagement with antecedent socialist imaginaries of the 1950s and 60s in terms of all complex political and literary formations they effectuated.

Of Footnotes and Foot Soldiers: al-Andalus and the Historical Novel in Urdu and Arabic

In 1999, the historian Anthony Grafton published an exhaustive account of the development of the footnote as an empirical and pedagogical tool in modern Western historiography delineating the many uses that the historical footnote has served over several centuries. Grafton extricates the footnote from its “lowly status” and reclaims its centrality in historical writing through a survey of canonical histories produced in German, French, English, and Italian. The blurb of the book, yet another testament to the ways in which paratext frames our reading, notes that it is not footnotes to history but footnotes as history that is Grafton’s singular contribution here. This paper poses the question of paratext and its performative gesture to the study of literary texts: what might be the rhetorical and evidentiary impetus behind the use of the footnote in novelistic writing? The unease with using footnotes in historical writing, and perhaps the move to endnotes, seems to have emerged from the perception of history as a form of literature to be read as a narrative unhindered by annotations. So, what might we make of footnotes that disrupt the flow of plot in novels and call attention to something outside of the textual universe? Is the hindrance in the story all the more troubling in forms that demand a certain suspension of disbelief from their readers such as fantasy or historical fiction? In this paper, I cogitate on the readerly possibilities ensconced in the use of paratext, in general, but the footnote in particular, by novelists. My analysis turns to some of the very first attempts at writing historical novels in Urdu (tārīkhi navil) and Arabic (rīwāyat tārīkhiyya) in the nineteenth century which were, in part, fashioned after European models such as the romances of Sir Walter Scott. The historical novels of Abdul Halim Sharar (1860 – 1926) and Jurji Zaidan (1861 – 1914), serialized in journals that they themselves published, enjoyed immense popularity for both the entertainment and the edification they contained. Beyond the more obvious objective of introducing history to their intended publics, Sharar and Zaidan were also invested in familiarizing their readership with new genres that suited their vision of literary modernity such as the historical novel. These novels, then, were not mere vehicles of Andalusian history. They also functioned as primers on how to read this history through the particularities of the form of the novel which their readers would have been largely unfamiliar with. As annotators, Sharar and Zaidan appeared in their footnotes, positioning themselves as consumers of history, as curators of facts, and as mediators between different linguistic and historical traditions. In locating this writing within the historical context of colonial modernity that it emerged from and responded to, I parse out the stakes of mobilizing the footnote as a tool of literary and historical erudition in newly emerging forms of narrative prose in the Global South.

Longue Durée Aesthetics and the Challenge of Postcolonial Theory

This paper charts ways in which deterritorialized genres can offer ways of exploring the relationship between literature and territorial anxieties in postcolonial states such as those of occupation, colonialism, nationalism, and exile. I use a palimpsestic lens to study twentieth-century Urdu and Arabic novels, focusing on how traces of precolonial genres and narrative modes such as the shahr ashob (lament poetry) and the rihla (travel writing) are layered in putatively modern forms (novels, short stories, etc). The paper focuses on two novels – Intizar Husain’s Basti (1979) and Naguib Mahfouz’s Rihlat ibn Fattouma (1983) – multi-generic novels whose narrative structures invoke a long history of literary exchange across a pan-Asian expanse. Their wandering protagonist-narrator figures and the shifts in the generic registers throughout the novels offer commentary on colonial and nationalist amnesias whereby shared literary and cultural histories are sequestered according to national borders. This paper then, explores how postcolonial authors draw on a longue durée generic memory of articulating territorial affiliation to contend with the vicissitudes of partition and its concomitant processes such as border-making, displacement and exile, linguistic minoritization, and parochial nationalisms.

Reading these narrative works as palimpsests and framing them politically as forms of deterritorialized literature offers multiple ways of unhitching postcolonial literary production from national borders. As a project that is rooted in challenging how non-European narrative genres (especially in the 20^th and 21^st centuries) have been studied within the reductive frames of Eurocentric theories of genre and the novel, I have chosen narratives that are symptomatic of the kind of vernacular writing that spills at national and generic borders, challenging the very stability of these conceptualizations. To read them scrupulously and outside the limiting theorizations of “novel” studies and “national” or “postcolonial” literature, I propose the palimpsest as both a metaphor and methodology, necessitating responsiveness to how texts theorize themselves, letting the “genre code” emerge from close reading rather than predetermining it.