What were the horizons of anti-colonial communism in the 1920s and 1930s? And what was the role of the Soviet Union in shaping the political imaginary of anti-colonial communists? In 1928 Fu’ad al-Shamali, a tobacco worker and co-founder of the Syrian and Lebanese Communist Party (SLCP), traveled to Moscow as a delegate to the Sixth Comintern Congress. Six years later he published an account of the trip under the title Madha Ra’aytu fi Moscow (What I Saw in Moscow). At the time of al-Shamali’s trip, Syria and Lebanon were under French colonial rule that had just faced its most serious challenge to date in the form of the Syrian Revolt of 1925-1927. Imprisoned from December 1926 until January 1928 for communist activity and participation in the revolt, al-Shamali became the General Secretary of the SLCP in 1928 following his release from prison and directly preceding his attendance at the Sixth Comintern Congress. What I Saw in Moscow is unique in form and content. Written for an audience assumed to be at minimum ignorant of and more likely antagonistic toward the politics and lived realities of the Soviet Union, it is split between his own experience in 1928 and a fictionalized journey a bourgeois tourist named “Henry” takes to Moscow. Al-Shamali’s trip to Moscow was undertaken clandestinely from Lebanon against the dictates of the French mandatory administration. His published reflections on the trip are virtually absent from the historiography on Arab communism and Arab communist engagement with the Soviet Union. This absence is curious given al-Shamali’s account is likely the earliest published account of an Arab communist’s trip to the Soviet Union. In this paper, I provide a close examination and contextualization of What I Saw in Moscow and of al-Shamali’s focus on and depictions of gender, internationalism, and class in the Soviet Union. I suggest that his depictions not only reflect utopian visions of communist society, but also speak to his assessments of Syrian and Lebanese attitudes toward the Soviet Union in this period. Drawing on French colonial archives in addition to Arabic daily newspapers, I consider how al-Shamali’s vision of social transformation in What I Saw in Moscow mapped onto his party and union organizing efforts. I propose that al-Shamali’s text offers new ways of understanding the role of the Soviet Union in the political orientation of communists in the anti-colonial Global South of the 1920s and 1930s.

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.

In December 1961, Nakhlé Mutran and Yusuf Khattar al-Helu, members of the Lebanese Communist Party (LCP), were invited by the newly founded Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples (ICAP) to celebrate the second anniversary of the Cuban Revolution. Having recently created the “Solidarity Committee with the Cuban Revolution” in Beirut, they left the island with a token of friendship: an anthology of contemporary Cuban poetry including “colloquial poems” by Roberto Fernández Retamar and Fayad Jamís. A few months later, these poems would appear in Arabic translation in al-Tariq, a cultural journal associated with the LCP, and one of the most important vehicles for the regional circulation of global anticolonial literature. Almost exactly two years later, in the midst of intensifying relations between Cuba’s Fidel Castro and Algeria’s Ahmed Ben Bella, the ICAP received a delegation from Algeria. To celebrate their arrival, the Francophone Algerian poet Jean Sénac published a poem in the newspaper al-Chaab. A multilingual panegyric titled “Salam Hermanos! La paix soit avec Cuba,” it concluded with the line: “Libertad! Houria! La Casbah salue La Havane!” This paper recovers the significance of the ICAP for the development of Third-Worldist poetics by examining the literary aftermaths of these two visits to Cuba from Lebanese and Algerian delegates. Despite its formative role during the early 60s, the ICAP has received little to no substantive attention from scholars of either Cuban cultural policy or Third-Worldist internationalism. Unlike the OSPAAAL (the Organization of Solidarity with the Peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America), which it preceded and outlived, the ICAP has been uncritically reduced to an apparatus of propaganda; its cultural effects outside of Cuba––despite the great number of delegates who visited the island thanks to its efforts––treated as if nonexistent. This paper seeks to rectify this omission less by reconstructing the institution’s functioning within the Cuban state than by illuminating the types of poetic work and imagination that its activities made possible outside of Cuba. A focus on the genre of the panegyric and colloquialism as a style, in particular, can help us rethink the parameters of influence that tend to dominate conversations about literary contact and exchange across the Third World.

Like many in his generation of Palestinian cultural producers, the Gazan writer Muin Bseiso played many roles. As a poet, journalist, playwright, critic, and essayist, Bseiso persistently fought to preserve and transmit Palestinian history and experience, stitching Palestine into the fabric of global Third World anticolonial struggles. His poetry is therefore simultaneously nationalist and internationalist: the 1965 collection Filastin fi al-Qalb (Palestine at Heart), for example, frequently invokes “my homeland” (ya watani) and “my people” (ya shaʿbi), but it also refers to other struggles against racial and colonial oppression, from the Algerian war of liberation (in the poem “Ring, Bells of the Commune”), to protests over the 1958 death sentence for Jimmy Wilson in Alabama (in “Song for an American Negro”), and from the July 14 revolution in Iraq (the ambivalent ode “Gunpowder Forearms”) to the 1964 popular liberation of imprisoned Iraqi Communist Party members from torture and death at Nugrat al-Salman prison (in “Iraq’s Third River”). This paper identifies a “poetics of suspension” at the heart of Bseiso’s poetry in Filastin fi al-Qalb, particularly in the poems “Ode to Barbed Wire” (Qasidah ila al-Aslak al-Shaʾikah) and “The Sailor Returning from Occupied Shores” (al-Bahhar al-ʿAʾid min al-Shatʾan al-Muhtallah), among others in the collection. This poetics of suspension emerges, I argue, in Bseiso’s figurative use of the Arabic conditional particles law and la. The poetic speaker introduces a series of conditional phrases beginning with “if” (law) yet refuses to close out the grammatical structure with the requisite “then” (la-) until the very final lines of the poem, leaving the reader hanging in the balance. Bseiso uses Arabic grammar, in other words, to give form, in language, to the state of suspension structuring Palestinian experiences of occupation, exile, displacement, siege, and destruction both material and epistemic. At the same time, “suspension” also describes the place Bseiso accords to Palestinian nationalism within his commitment to Third World internationalism: as his poetic speakers witness and celebrate liberation struggles around the world, they also make creative use of Christological imagery and surprising, surrealist noun-adjective juxtapositions to elaborate a specifically Palestinian grammar of freedom, always linked to the invoked watan and shaʿb. Rather than apply methodologies or theories of reading to Bseiso’s work, then, I deduce an epistemology—a mode of knowing—from the poetry itself.

Soviet journalism is typically associated with straightforward political propaganda. Its high level of ideologization, while perceived as a shortcoming by the opponents of the USSR in the Cold War, was appealing to the activists of anticolonial movements who strove for politically engaged journalism and rejected the principle of journalistic objectivity as beneficial to Western colonialism. The basic assumption promoted by Soviet journalism - that it is impossible for journalists to have no ideological principles - allowed participants of anticolonial movements to think about journalism as an instrument in the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggle. My research is based on the dissertations written by Arab students of journalism in the USSR who explored the concept of “publitsistika” – a Russian word denoting a certain type of journalism that combined sophisticated literary criticism with ideologically progressive socio-political analysis. It stems from a journalistic tradition that provided social critique under the label of literature reviews in the condition of authoritarian pressure in such different societies as the French Republic of Letters of the XVII century or the XIX century Ottoman and Russian Empires (after Tanzimat reforms and the Great reforms of the 1860s respectively). It was institutionalized as a “theory of publitsistika” by Soviet scholars in the 1960s and taught to foreign students who started enrolling in Soviet universities en masse after WWII. I argue that Arab students in Soviet universities were drawn to this tradition because it provided them with a vision of a journalist as a politically engaged actor – an intellectual militant, a writer who is using their talent to engender mass enlightenment and spread knowledge helpful to building a new society. As a result, I unexpectedly uncovered a liberation potential in the presumably most ideologized sphere of Soviet life: this type of journalism was attractive to the Arab students because it offered a defense against the so-called “information imperialism“- the influence of the Western media and news agencies in the newly liberated countries. The reinforcement of subjectivity as inescapable in journalism in the Soviet media theory, as opposed to the dominant concept of “information neutrality” in Western journalism, enabled Arab students, who were influential public figures in their countries, to clearly establish their ideological positions and to define ideological struggle as an essential part of a public sphere.

This paper argues that ghumūd (obscurity) acquired a new significance in Egyptian literary aesthetics during the 1970s for three interrelated reasons. On an allegorical level, ghumūd gestured to a new disposition of forces in the postcolonial, Cold War era. Geopolitical power manifested variously in this period in hypervisible forms—authoritarian governance, Israeli belligerence and expansionism, anti-communist and anti-Islamist counterinsurgency—as well as recondite ways, as the classic imperial powers withdrew behind the veils of neocolonial exploitation and client regimes. The challenge of worldly art, then, was to produce a new cognitive mapping that could account not only for the shift in modes of governance but also for the redistribution of sensible forms of power on which that shift depended. Egyptian writers in turn thematized the invisible or absent powers that nevertheless determined their lives through a variety of literary, cultural, and religious topoi ranging from the rumor about an all-powerful master manipulator to the figure of the hidden imam in Shi‘a doctrine. On a conceptual level, ghumūd referenced the general climate of disappointment about the failed promise of the anticolonial moment and the uncertainty about the function of art after successive defeats. It described a loss of the systematic worldview that had underpinned the political and aesthetic movements of the anticolonial era. It also expressed dissatisfaction with the presumption of obviousness at stake in the anticolonial generation’s presentation of the urgency of the now. As a term of literary criticism and a principle of poetics, for example in the work of Shafiq Majali and Ghalib Halasa, ghumūd indexed a new privation of common sense and the disorientation of artists and activists. On a formal level, finally, ghumūd was the license for a new period of experimentation. But whereas in modernist literature of the West experimentation was underwritten by the principle of play with respect to a rule, in coeval literature of Egypt (and elsewhere) experimentation more often served an epistemological function. Its aim was rather to understand and represent a world subject to disavowed imperial and settler colonial logics. In the case of Gamal al-Ghitani, the layering of narrative levels reproduced the hierarchical arrangement of a world structured in dominance. But syntactical, narratological, and rhetorical deviations from the classical realist plot didn’t only register a critique. In Idwar al-Kharrat, for example, asyndeton brought into the reader’s field of vision the possibility of alternative solidarities unmediated by empire.