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The Struggle for World Peace: Afro-Asian Solidarity and Decolonization in the Theater of 'Abd al-Rahman al-Sharqawi
Abstract
This paper explores the literary echoes of Egyptian author ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Sharqawi’s anticolonial activism as a leading member of the Soviet-supported Partisans of Peace and Afro-Asian People's Solidarity Organization. First, through a reading of "Bandung wa-l-salam al-’alimi" ("Bandung and World Peace," 1956)—Sharqawi’s first-hand report on the 1955 Afro-Asian conference in Bandung, Indonesia—I argue that Sharqawi envisioned the Arab world’s ongoing rebellion against colonial domination not as an end in itself but as a central modality of positive neutrality in the Cold War and the broader movement for world peace. Considering the place of the Palestinian and North African struggles for national liberation in Sharqawi’s narrative of the Afro-Asian project, I contend that Sharqawi viewed self determination as a crucial first step in the creation of a new global political order founded upon the socialist values of peaceful coexistence and cooperation rather than exploitation and war. Next, the paper attends to how Sharqawi’s plays staged the concrete dilemmas of decolonization in the region while giving literary voice to the Afro-Asian predicament as a whole. Reading "Ma’sat Jamila" (“The Tragedy of Djamila,” 1959)—about the Algerian war of liberation—side by side with "Watani ‘akka" (“My Nation Acre,” 1968)—about the 1967 naksa—I argue that Sharqawi’s real-time and realistic literary renditions of these landmarks in the history of decolonization mobilized the classical dramaturgical tropes and devices of tragedy to advance a transnational critique of the racialized and gender-based violence of settler colonialism. In doing so, I argue that Sharqawi cast the anticolonial battlegrounds of the Arab world as the front lines of the Third World’s collective struggle to liberate humanity from the dehumanizing racial logic of imperialism. The paper concludes with a meditation on the relationship between Sharqawi’s literary production and his deft navigation of multiple overlapping Soviet-backed initiatives. I suggest that Sharqawi’s enduring presence on the circuits of Soviet cultural diplomacy did not require him to toe the ideological line of the CPSU or support the narrow interests of the Soviet Union but rather served to broaden the political horizon of his Arab nationalist critique of colonialism into a critique of the bipolar world order of the Cold War.
Discipline
Literature
Geographic Area
Algeria
Egypt
former Soviet Union
Gaza
Israel
Palestine
West Bank
Sub Area
None