Arab Artists in Cold War Capitals: Travelogues and Visual Narratives of Moscow and Beijing Throughout the third quarter of the twentieth-century, Arab states were still negotiating their alignments with, against, or between the cold war superpowers, in cultural as well as political terms, the ostensibly polarizing, albeit fading memories of both the Baghdad Pact and the Bandung Conference of 1955 notwithstanding (Matthews 2011; Bashkin 2011; Cook 2012). Arab painters, sculptors, illustrators, and cartoonists were often important exponents of the cultural policies of their newly independent states and helped forge identities that resonated in international and domestic terms (Winegar 2006; Hijris 2005; Gershoni and Jankowski 2004; `Iraq 2002). Arab artists embarked on journeys to communist countries as part of cultural missions in both unofficial and official capacities. The celebrated Egyptian editorial cartoonist Taha Ibrahim al-`Adawi, aka “Zuhdi” (1917-1994), and the renowned Iraqi graphic artist Rafa` al-Nasiri (1940-2013), made visits to Moscow and Beijing, respectively. Of particular note, they also published illustrated travelogues of their journeys which graphically document the cultural political climate in these cold war capitals from perspectives unfamiliar to Western observers. Furthermore, both works provide vivid textual narratives and illustrations of the country, the people, and the artists they encountered and constitute examples of hybrid literary genres. Zuhdi’s account Fannan fi Mosku (1973) graphically and verbally details the artist’s four-week stay in the Soviet capital for the Second International Exhibition of Caricature for Liberation and Peace. The core of Al-Nasiri’s Rihlati ila al-Sin (2012) revolves around his four-year stay studying art in China from 1959-1963 and his return visit in 1989. No less than for their perspectives of the host countries, these accounts are of interest for their reflections of views of the politics, economy, and culture of the United States. To be sure, al-Nasiri’s memoir, benefitting from hindsight, presents a more subtle and critical discussion than Zuhdi’s “dispatch.” Neither al-Nasiri nor Zuhdi appear to embrace wholesale the ideological rhetoric of these environments, however. The visual dimensions of their accounts convey subtle inter-textual nuances to the narratives. As such, both serve as important examples of late twentieth-century travelogues, worth comparing with the accounts of earlier modern Arab travelers from al-Tahtawi onward, and reveal how the developing Arab text-image discourses of the time were not as starkly colored by the jargons of contending cold war alliances as they are often portrayed.