Vignettes of Afro-Asia, 1962: After-Hours Routes and Intertextual Afterlives

The Second Afro-Asian Writers’ Conference, which convened in Cairo in 1962 and took place amid a sea change in the Third World, was most significant in securing specifically the literary arm of the Afro-Asian movement. This essay fashions two vignettes that place center stage two writers who participated, Kateb Yacine and Nâzım Hikmet, each representing an issue that mobilized fellow Afro-Asian intellectuals and freedom fighters. In relation to these two dramatis personae, the essay trains attention on interventions in conference halls as much as in impromptu after-hours encounters to elicit imaginaries of shared heritage, tensions between liberation-period positions, and the travel of intertextual tropes of solidarity past these writers’ passage through Cairo. Guarding against attributing the solidarities of the period to a mere top-down manifestation of institutional patronage, the essay extricates from the vignettes features of something in the nature of an Afro-Asian commune of letters.