World literature redefined: Afro-Asian Writers’ conference and Hotta Yoshie’s remapping of Lu Xun

This article examines the profound and evolving engagement of post-war Japanese writer Hotta Yoshie with the Chinese intellectual Lu Xun. It takes as its central puzzle Hotta's paradoxical shift in attitude toward Lu Xun's tomb: from a stated wish in 1956 to revisit the modest grave he had seen in wartime Shanghai to his deliberate refusal to visit the newly monumentalized tomb during a 1957 trip to China. This study argues that Hotta's transformation was not merely personal, but driven by a fundamental intellectual reorientation spurred by his active participation in the Afro-Asian Writers’ Movement. Through a comparative analysis of his writings on Shanghai and his travelogues from India, the article demonstrates how Hotta re-contextualized his “Shanghai experience” within a broader critique of colonial modernity and global capitalism. He came to see Shanghai not as an isolated memory but as a node in a global system of exploitation shared by cities like Calcutta. Consequently, Hotta's interpretation of Lu Xun transcended the confines of Sino-Japanese relations, reimagining him as a universal symbol of resistance for the nascent Third World. His essays and travelogues, particularly In Shanghai (1959), reflect a critical re-evaluation of world literature—challenging Eurocentric canons and emphasizing the centrality of anti-colonial thought. Hotta's refusal to visit the new tomb is thus interpreted as a political act—a rejection of the erasure of individual, historical struggle in favor of a monolithic state narrative, and a profound statement on the politics of memory in the Cold War era.