Paper short abstract:

This paper looks at Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings, a trilingual journal published from Cairo by the Afro-Asian Writers' Association, and investigates the literary and visual strategies for creating transnational "archipelagic" memory with a Pan-African relevance.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores entangled African memories surfacing from the "Afrasian" (Desai 2013) waters of the Indian Ocean by looking at the journal Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings as a site of construction of a transnational and polyvocal memory constellation in a Pan-African and Indian Ocean perspective. The spirit of Asian-African solidarity that emerged from the Bandung Conference of 1955, while premised on a mutual recognition of national interests and individual social trajectories, relied on an overarching narrative rooted in a collaborative practice of remembrance of the pre-colonial history of exchange and the shared experience of colonial oppression. Based in Cairo and inspired by the spirit of Bandung, Lotus was a trilingual journal published from the late 1960s by the Afro-Asian Writers' Association, bringing together stories, poems, works of art and studies by writers, artists and intellectuals from Africa and Asia. For emerging and established African writers in the 1960s-70s from across imperial formations and colonial and vernacular languages, Lotus served as a major platform for contact and reciprocal knowledge, and for initiating an "anti-Eurocentric project of comparatism" (Halim 2012). By mobilising Édouard Glissant's notion of archipelagic thinking (1997) and Ottmar Ette's concept of the trans-archipelagic (2010), both interpreted as epistemological alternatives for approaching Afro-Asian memory-making, I will investigate the literary and visual strategies used in Lotus for creating transnational archipelagic memory with a Pan-African relevance, focusing primarily on mémoires croisées (Vergès 2012) or intersecting acts of remembrance from African and Asian writers alike.