Scholars of modern Egypt have begun to reassess how they approach the 1960s, a decade of major transformations in the country typically tethered to the 1967 War. This work has shifted focus away from political dimensions and drawn on cultural productions like literature and cinema to study the period beyond a framework of trauma (Abou-El-Fadl 2019; El Saket 2023). Yet, scholarship largely continues to center local and regional (pan-Arab) solidarities of the decade, as well as Egypt’s relations with the US/Europe. There remains comparatively little on the ways that Egyptians asserted links in other directions, thus overlooking a more complex history of global flows. This paper investigates Egypt’s cultural connections with Japan during the 1960s. It discusses exchanges between these far ends of Asia through a case study of the late Egyptian artist Ragai Wanis (1938–2023). Wanis first visited Japan in 1962 on assignment with his employer Ruz al-Yusuf, the popular weekly. Enchanted by its “amazing blend of old and new,” he returned to Japan shortly after to study and work for five years in the mid-sixties. As I show, Wanis was part of a broader shift that prompted writers, actors, musicians, and many state officials to visit the distant nation. My analysis of this period draws on a range of sources—Wanis’ published memoirs, his paintings, and photographs—to uncover a vibrant period of transregional entanglements after mid-century, when new travel infrastructures and media brought the two countries closer than ever before. Ultimately, in examining figures like Wanis, this paper offers an alternative narrative for Egypt’s 1960s while highlighting how the field of cultural production can add new texture to our understanding of the Middle East.

To ward off the Axis powers during World War II, the British mobilized the cultural and linguistic connections that cut across the “Middle East” and “South Asia” regional boundaries, which they - as colonizers - had imposed. For example, Urdu poet N. M. Rashid worked for Radio Tehran as part of his service in the British Army; the All-India Radio based in Delhi had programs that broadcast news in Arabic and Persian; the War Pictoral News was produced in Arabic and Persian in Cairo for distribution to Allied troops in the Middle East; India Film Units created newsreels to garner support for the Allied forces across West/South Asia. These are just several examples of the interconnected infrastructures of war, radio, news, and entertainment across West/South Asia during World War II. Despite what these connections can tell us about the role of radio, newsreels, and other sound media in reinforcing and subverting political boundaries during the war, regional and national frameworks have overwhelmingly obfuscated these linkages in scholarship and the popular imagination. In this presentation, I consider the circulation of radio broadcasts, newsreels, and the voices of radio announcers as part of a longer history of cinematic and other sonic exchanges in West/South Asia. To tell this history, I demonstrate how what I call “sonic infrastructures” both enabled the movements of sounds across consolidating national and regional borders and reified these borders as well. For this particular chapter within this longer arc of exchange, I develop the concept of jamming to understand specifically how the Axis and Allied powers, as well as of anti-colonial/imperial movements, struggled to define and defy the boundaries of the soundscape of West/South Asia during the war vis-à-vis the radio, newsreels, and propaganda thrillers. I invoke jamming in its common usage as deliberate interference in radio broadcasts, such British attempts to disrupt Radio Free Berlin broadcasts to listeners in West/South Asia. But I also draw on scholar Usha Iyer’s conception of jamming as including improvisation to demonstrate how this subversion occurred in less obvious audible ways.

Over the past decade and a half, the world became captivated by the allure of Turkish television dramas. Viewers all over the world became enamored by attractive actors, tantalizing views of Istanbul, and compelling narratives. Turkish TV series unraveled local cultural dynamics, histories, and anxieties, as millions around the world came to terms with this powerful new global media. Burgeoning academic scholarship has explored the global popularity of Turkish TV series. The Middle East and the Balkans, as well as Latin America, are the most prominent foci of scholarship, and studies are slowly emerging from Western Europe and Central and South Asia. At the intersection of global media studies and cultural diplomacy, this study, through in-depth interviews with a diverse cohort of Japanese audience members who regularly consume Turkish series, will provide a first look at the phenomenon of Turkish series in East Asia. These interviews are designed to extract nuanced understandings of the viewers' perceptions, emotional engagements, and the cultural dialogues initiated by their exposure to Turkish storytelling. Central to this investigation is the theory of Neo-Ottomanism as a form of soft power, a strategic deployment of Turkey's historical and cultural assets to forge stronger international relations and cultural ties. The concept of neo-Ottoman cool (Kraidy & Al-Ghazzi, 2013) highlights the role of popular culture in transcending traditional diplomacy. By analyzing the narratives, themes, and cultural motifs appreciated by Japanese audiences, this study seeks to map the contours of Turkish influence through media, shedding light on how Turkish television series contribute to the broader discourse of cultural globalization and soft power dynamics. Through thematic analysis of interview transcripts, the project aims to identify key factors contributing to the popularity of Turkish series among Japanese viewers, including perceptions of cultural proximity, the appeal of Turkish historical narratives, and the role of media in shaping cross-cultural understandings. This research not only contributes to the scholarly understanding of global media flows and cultural diplomacy but also offers insights into the potential of television series as vehicles for soft power and intercultural dialogue.

Ahmad Ali Kohzad’s visit to China in 1958, as documented in an essay originally published in Persian Dari in the Afghan magazine Āryānā, offers a fresh perspective on the intersection of heritage, development discourse, and international relations during the mid-20th century. Kohzad, a prominent Afghan historian, intellectual, and political activist framed his narrative around the shared historical ties between China and Central Asia. Through a shared historical experience linked by the spread of Buddhism, the exchange of diplomatic missions, and economic exchange along the Silk Road, Kohzad imagines Afghanistan as part of a broad community of Asian states, despite the difference in their recent history, political systems, and ideological convictions. This international solidarity is deployed to reinforce a sense of national consciousness and benefit nation-building projects at home; or, as Berthold Unfried and Claudia Martinez Hernández put it, to create a “patriotic internationalism.” By juxtaposing this shared history with the impact of colonialism and the problem of economic development, his essay brings into focus the links between the various socialist, nationalist, and development discourses that animated the Non-Aligned and Afro-Asian movements. These linkages were a key factor in the appeal of those movements, which helped facilitate ties between nations with significant differences in their approach to politics and economic development. Kohzad’s essay is an important source for understanding how different locales responded to development discourse and the challenges of modernity. His narrative emphasizes solidarity among Asian nations and advocating for state-led development helps highlight the role of Afghanistan and Central Asia in the history of socialism and development discourse. His portrayal of China as a model for economic success underscored Afghanistan’s aspirations for modernization and industrialization. More broadly, it demonstrates how individuals across Asia were actively working to build a common sense of national identity through international solidarity. They found common ground by (re)imagining a shared history and tapping into anti-colonial discourses of national renewal that were circulating globally, especially in the Non-Aligned, Afro-Asian, and international socialist movements. The enduring rhetorical power of the combination of heritage and developmental discourse continues to be a core feature of China’s diplomacy in the Global South. Understanding these relationships can therefore not only help to de-provincialize the history of Central Asian and Afghanistan, but also to better understand a critical set of contemporary political and economic relationships.

Xinjiang (lit. the New Dominion) only became Xinjiang in 1759 under the Qianlong Emperor of the Manchu Qing court following Qing’s conquer of the Mongol-ruled Zunghar Khanate, and Qing control of Xinjiang officially ended with its collapse in 1911. Egypt came under the impact of European imperialism in 1798 launched by Napoleon’s expedition whose brief control was superseded by Muhammad Ali Pasha in 1805, followed by British dominion from 1882 to 1956. Both spanned around one and a half centuries and their timeframes overlap for more than one century, thus temporally the imperial and colonial projects of Xinjiang and Egypt are quite comparable. But coevality isn’t the only ground nor merit of the seemingly random juxtaposition of Xinjiang and Egypt. By utilizing Qing sources including imperial edicts, gazetteers, and travelogues, as well as history writings by James Millward, Peter Purdue, Sean Roberts, Rian Thum, Eric Schluessel, Kwangmin Kim, and Joanna Waley-Cohen among others, I will discern comparable counterparts of imperial workings in Xinjiang and Egypt in three domains: knowledge production and representation, economism and capitalism, and discipline and civilization (as a verbal noun). This paper further investigates the staggered foci of writings on Qing imperial power and that of European imperial powers: as the former accents “imperial”, and the latter “powers”. Indeed, to faithfully reflect the recurrence in writings on Qing Xinjiang to open with qualifying Qing as an imperial power and, to a lesser degree, Xinjiang as a colonizing project, I will complicate the designation of Qing as an empire and justify deploying the framework of imperialism to the Qing dynasty. Despite the numerous comparable imperial tactics and instruments shared (or rather devised by each independently) between Qing and European imperialism, scholars on Qing Xinjiang seemed to have been content with citing the edicts and recording enforcements and aftermaths thereof in a somewhat discrete and discreet manner. By contrast, Egypt under the European powers is routinely treated as an archetype of imperialist and Orientalist colonization projects. Elaboration and extensive theorization of the meticulous and pervasive imperial workings in Egypt are seen in Timothy Mitchell and Aaron Jakes among others. Even Said took the 1798 Napoleon expedition as the inaugural point of systematic Orientalist knowledge production. Hence, this paper lastly attempts to identify potential causes and implications of such disparate treatments and representations of imperial powers and colonization.