ABSTRACT The Afro-Asian Writers’ Association and its journal Lotus are increasingly recognized as representing rich resources for better understanding literary Third-Worldism, the formation of postcolonial studies and a postcolonial canon, as well as the mutually constitutive relationship between postcolonialism and the Cold War. For most of its life, Lotus’s English and French editions were printed by the Solidarity Committee of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Emphasizing the journal’s materiality, this article undertakes a close examination of this connection to the GDR, arguing that the Solidarity Committee’s involvement facilitated a desirable self-imaging for East Germany and that the publication as a physical object is framed in its own pages as a manifestation of practices of solidarity between the Second and Third Worlds. By drawing out Lotus’s production and circulation networks, the investigation reveals how the relationship between Afro-Asian cultural practitioners and the GDR was configured to be mutually beneficial. As a material object, the journal took the traces of this relationship represented in its pages where it traveled, instantiated here by one example of its arrival in Mumbai in the 1980s. Illuminating these facets of Lotus’s production and circulation serves enhanced understanding of the various tributaries that fed into the co-constitution of the Third-Worldism of which the journal was a part.
Lucy Gasser (Fri,) studied this question.