UNIVERSITY of CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Cold War Africa and China: the Afro-Asian Writers' Bureau and the Rise of Postcolonial Li
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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Cold War Africa and China: The Afro-Asian Writers’ Bureau and the Rise of Postcolonial Literature A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature by Duncan McEachern Yoon 2014 © Copyright by Duncan McEachern Yoon 2014 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Cold War Africa-China: The Afro-Asian Writers’ Bureau and the Rise of Postcolonial Literature by Duncan McEachern Yoon Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature University of California, Los Angeles, 2014 Professor Dominic Thomas, Chair This dissertation argues for an alternative history of postcolonial literature anchored in the cultural exchanges of Africa and Asia. The project claims a strong, but tenuous Africa-China imaginary emerged during 1960s decolonization through the Afro-Asian Writers’ Bureau founded in 1957. Analysis of their anthologies of world literature reveals an early crystallization of a postcolonial aesthetic rooted in Afro-Asian expressions of solidarity. As a result, the Bureau’s Sino-Soviet split in 1966 would magnify Africa as a contested ground of “literary” realpolitik. This dissertation locates the emergence of postcolonial literature outside of a colony’s relationship to a colonial metropole. Also, it reexamines Cold War literary networks from a postcolonial perspective. African engagement with Chinese literary theory thereby yields a provocative South-to-South vector of decolonization’s aesthetic history. ii The dissertation of Duncan McEachern Yoon is approved. Shu-mei Shih Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o Gil Hochberg Dominic Thomas, Committee Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2014 iii Table of Contents Acknowledgements v Vita vi Introduction 1 Chapter 1 From Bandung to Conakry: Symbolic Maoism and Afro-Asian Solidarity (1955-1960) 5 Chapter 2 From the Congo Crisis to Sino-Soviet Realpolitik: The Afro-Asian Writers Bureau’s Colombo Period (1961-1966) 52 Chapter 3 Senghor’s Maoism: “Stylization for the People” at the First Congress of Black Writers and Artists 118 Chapter 4 “Beyond the Cliché and Slogan”: Afro-Asian Solidarity and The Crisis of Representation in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o 169 Conclusion Afro-Asian Legacies: Postcolonialism as a Concept of History 216 Appendix A The strengthening of national Cultures in the Afro-Asian countries and the Development of the Afro-Asian Personality 218 Bibliography 219 iv Acknowledgements I am extremely grateful to the UCLA Department of Comparative Literature and UCLA Graduate Division for their substantial support over the years. I would also like to thank the Social Science Research Council for their support of my research in the form of the International Dissertation Research Fellowship. I would also like to express my gratitude to my committee members, Dominic Thomas, Shu-mei Shih, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Gil Hochberg for their insightful comments and support. v Vita Duncan McEachern Yoon has a BA in English and French from DePauw University and an MA from Dartmouth College. He served as a Fulbright Scholar to South Korea in 2004. vi Introduction This dissertation argues the Afro-Asian Writers Bureau (AAWB) provides an alternative genealogy of postcolonial and world literature anchored in the transnational cultural relations of a Cold War Third World. Beginning in 1960, the Bureau adopted a controversial Maoist- inflected cultural platform. Many African writers involved in the organization would appropriate this cultural policy for their own national liberation projects. These interpretations brought about strong misreadings of Maoist literary theory during decolonization movements in the 1960s.1 As such, an Africa-China imaginary emerged which was both grounded in the solidarity of cultural struggle, and fraught by Cold War realpolitik. The project rereads the Cold War from outside American and Soviet perspectives. It also locates the emergence of postcolonialism outside of the colonies’ relationship with the colonial metropoles.2 Moreover, it provides a cultural historicization of China’s current and often contentious presence in Africa. The first chapter claims the Bureau’s inaugural 1957 conference in Tashkent explicitly sought to redefine world literature through the rehabilitation of African and Asian definitions of humanism. It also contends Maoist literary theory represented a provocative, if flawed, alternative for many African writers due to its definition of the role of literature as a catalyst for a new society. As a result many postcolonial writers, including Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire, misread Maoist theory as an example of a non-Western humanism. 1 See Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence wherein he writes, “[…] the anxiety of influence comes out of a complex act of strong misreading, a creative interpretation that I call ‘poetic misprision’” (Bloom xxiii). Also his next work, A Map of Misreading. 2 The project uses the term “postcolonialism” in reference to Ato Quayson’s usage in his Introduction to The Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature: “Despite the designation of postcolonialism as a field of discursive practices as opposed to the temporal supersession of colonialism, the collective attempt to outline a literary history of postcolonial writing foregrounds certain conceptual and methodological difficulties for the elaboration of such a history. The time and inception of the colonial and how they are understood as process as opposed to singular ruptures is decisive for both determining the literary writing that is taken to fall under the rubric of postcolonialism and the criticism that sees itself as doing justice to such writing.” (Quayson 6). 1 This chapter applies Fredric Jameson’s notion of “symbolic Maoism” to re-periodize the global sixties according to an Afro-Asian transnationalism (Jameson 188). Accordingly, “symbolic Maoism” was not Maoism as it existed in China. Rather, the chapter shows how Maoism became symbolic when it was interpreted by outside actors in a variety of global contexts. African writers’ encounter with “symbolic Maoism” did not make them Maoist. Instead it demonstrated the range of ideas entangled in African definitions of postcolonialism during the period. The first chapter also claims the Bureau was an intervention against what Ato Quayson calls “colonial space-making” (Quayson 16). The Bureau defined decolonization as more than just a simple linear movement forward into independence. Such a “concept of history” brought together disparate geographies in order to define postcolonialism as a simultaneous negotiation across multiple politico-cultural contexts (Jameson 180). The second chapter contends the Bureau’s anthologies of poetry published in 1963 and 1965 were examples of “third world literature,” compiled according to the Bureau’s Maoist- inflected cultural platform. Close readings of poets such as Dennis Brutus, Kofi Awoonor and Mazisi Kunene reveal the anthologies represent an early crystallization of a postcolonial aesthetic rooted in Afro-Asian expressions of solidarity. It also argues this aesthetic sutured literature to politics in order to write for a local audience committed to the lived reality of decolonization’s struggle. Furthermore, this chapter argues the collapsing together of art and anti-colonial struggle embodied what Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth called “combat literature” (Fanon, Wretched 159). The second chapter also shows how the Sino-Soviet conflict would split the Bureau in 1966 into Chinese and Soviet factions. This split produced a “socialist scramble” on the African 2 continent. While Soviet literary models played an important role, the chapter argues “symbolic Maoism” played as crucial a role for African writers during the period. As a result, definitions of postcolonialism were no longer based primarily in a relationship between colonizer and colonized. Instead, the AAWB oversaw the emergence of postcolonialism as a politico-aesthetic category that was not only anchored in but also constructed through South-to-South transnational exchanges of the Cold War period. The third chapter steps out of the Bureau’s history to explore the appropriation of “symbolic Maoism” by Léopold Sédar Senghor, beginning with his debate with Jacques-Stéphan Alexis at the First Congress of Black Writers and Artists in 1956. Through an analysis of Senghor’s imaginary of China in his 1961 collection Nocturnes, the chapter argues for a new South-to-South cultural vector through which to read the emergence of Senghor’s postcolonialism. For Senghor, Maoist theory represented an alternative model for culture and development that whatever its ultimate deficiencies, was predicated on the importance of translation and cultural difference. As such Senghor’s “Maoism” was an endorsement of the symbolic value of a non-Western national model that was not a blatant copy of Western universalism. He would exploit this symbolic power of an alternative as he implemented his own project of African socialism in Senegal. The final chapter returns to the history of the Bureau post split into Chinese (AAWB) and Soviet (Permanent Bureau) factions. It argues Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, who received the Permanent Bureau’s Lotus Award in 1973, provides a cipher through which to read African involvement during the latter years of the organization. Ngũgĩ’s grappling with the crisis of representation during the period provided a local, African example for the Bureau’s tenuous linking of ideology and aesthetics within a transnational framework. 3 As such,