Teaching International Solidarity through Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings

Abstract

The magazine testifies to a socialist vision of global transformation that entailed a commitment to learning each other’s languages, sustaining cooperation across vast and often fraught geographies, and finding words and arguments for each other’s struggles. Contributors argued explicitly that the structural nature of racist and colonial oppression requires us to think and write comparatively. For this reason, Hala Halim argued that Lotus provides an “alternative … line of descent” for the field of comparative literature, one that sees the discipline emerging out of the anticolonial, anti-Eurocentric movements in the Global South.3 As part of its structural analysis, Lotus also articulated powerful literary and artistic critiques of development and underdevelopment, which alert international development students to the political economy of race and racialization, and to the relationship between global capitalism and (neo)colonialism. In this sense, Lotus lends itself to advancing a more critical pedagogy in both of our disciplines: comparative literature and international development. As a teaching device, Lotus itself urges its readers to look outside the classroom, and students can find in Lotus a template to think about the continuity of colonial and racist power configurations, on the one hand, and of the connected struggles against them, on the other.4 Our students, for example, immediately situated the 2020–21 Black Lives Matter movement and the Palestinian solidarity protests in the UK as part of the political lineage of the time of Lotus. The contradictions, tensions, and potential limitations of the Lotus project are, of course, part of the legacy of the journal,5 and they provide a framework for researchers and students to critically appraise the unfinished character of the project of anticolonial solidarity. In its centering of anticolonial resistance and countering of Eurocentric historiography, Lotus pedagogically advances the efforts to decolonize the university and university curricula, while also providing some of the tools needed to oppose their institutional co-optation. A “decolonization” of knowledge production entails questioning the material processes through which histor y and memor y are produced, destroyed, and silenced; Lotus bore witness to some of these processes. The Lotus archive today is scattered and incomplete, partly as a result of those same colonial geographies that the magazine set out to oppose and that forced its operations to relocate twice. Nearly every issue of Lotus centered Palestinian liberation as an urgent Afro-Asian demand, but studying the history of this solidarity comes up against the 1982 Israeli destruction and looting of the PLO archive in Beirut.6 More of that destruction is being wrought as we write this piece, as the son of Muin Bseiso, the Palestinian poet who edited the Arabic version of Lotus in its Beirut years, is trying to save his father’s papers from the bombs and displacement of Israel’s attack on Gaza.7 Finally, not only does Lotus teach how to think solidarity, but it also interpellates its readers on the necessity to do solidarity. The printed words in Lotus keep referring the readers back to the sociohistorical context beyond the page, and the conjured up and produced in practice.2.