Edward Said observed in Orientalism that the United States inherited the imperial mantel of the French and British with the slow collapse of European empires after World War II and into the Cold War, when American capitalism pursued increasingly global encounters with Communism. At Bandung in 1955, Afro-Asian peoples came together in solidarity and non-alignment, creating the Afro-Asian Writers Association (AAWA). From 1955, the official languages of the Afro-Asian movement were English, French and Arabic, capitalizing on the expansive linguistic geographies of empires past and passing. Inspired by Marx and Mao, and, by the 1960s, funded by the Soviets, the AAWA sought to tap imperial French and British literary networks, and those that subtended Islamic statecraft, and use them “in the struggle … against imperial oppression and foreign rule.” In 1968, their journal, Afro-Asian Writings (later renamed Lotus) published its first issue, appending a small-print section, set off on light pink paper in the Arabic edition, containing documents and reports of the AAWA meetings and resolutions. We read of the 1967 conference held in Beirut, where the “new imperial infiltration of culture” by the United States Central Intelligence Agency’s covertly founded and funded Congress for Cultural Freedom was at the center of a discussion of “resistance” – in the Arabic edition, muqawamah -- of “imperialist cultural activities.” The AAWA’s work is elaborated in a report on the earlier Cairo and Tashkent meetings in language distinctively embroidered with that of Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, such that Afro-Asian Writings offers the Manifesto’s vision of world literature – “intellectual creations of individual nations become common property ... and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature” – a riposte from what became with Bandung “the third world.” The Manifesto’s “remotest zones,” sources of raw material and markets for industrial products, cite Marx and Engels as they plot to distribute Afro-Asian Writings “not only to the Afro-Asian countries, but all over the world,” so that they might be, as Marx and Engels have it, “consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe.” The paper ends by considering how this reading of the AAWA’s conception of literature redounds on Ghassan Kanafani’s “Resistance Literature in Occupied Palestine” (an essay version of his book Adab al-muqawamah fi Filastin al-muhtallah) published in Afro-Asian Writings’ widely disseminated second issue.