Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Table of Contents
- Chapter 1 Introduction: The Lives of Cold War Afro-Asianism
- Chapter 2 Here and There: A Story of Women’s Internationalism, 1948-1953
- Chapter 3 Résistantes Against the Colonial Order: Women’s Grassroots Diplomacy During the French War in Vietnam (1945-1954)
- Interlude: Asian-African Solidarity
- Chapter 4 Asian Socialism and the Forgotten Architects of Post-Colonial Freedom
- Chapter 5 Where was the Afro in Afro-Asian Solidarity? Africa’s ‘Bandung Moment’
- Chapter 6 Asia as a Third Way? J.C. Kumarappa and the Problem of Development in Asia
- Interlude: The Dead Will Live Eternally
- Chapter 7 Delhi versus Bandung: Local Anti-imperialists and the Afro- Asian Stage
- Chapter 8 Building Egypt’s Afro-Asian Hub: Infrastructures of Solidarity in 1950s Cairo
- Chapter 9 Soviet “Afro-Asians” in UNESCO: Reorienting World History and Humanism
- Chapter 10 A Forgotten Bandung : The Afro-Asian Students’ Conference and the Call for Decolonisation
- Interlude: Yesterday and Today
- Chapter 11 Dispatches from Havana : The Cold War, Afro-Asian Solidarities, and Culture Wars in Pakistan
- Chapter 12 Microphone Revolution : North Korean Cultural Diplomacy During the Liberation of Southern Africa
- Chapter 13 Eqbal Ahmad: An Affective Reading of Afro-Asianism
- Chapter 14 Passports to the Post-colonial World: Space and Mobility in Francisca Fanggidaej’s Afro-Asian Journeys
- Epilogue: Afro-Asianism Revisited
- About the Authors
- Index
Chapter 8 - Building Egypt’s Afro-Asian Hub: Infrastructures of Solidarity in 1950s Cairo
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 November 2024
- Frontmatter
- Table of Contents
- Chapter 1 Introduction: The Lives of Cold War Afro-Asianism
- Chapter 2 Here and There: A Story of Women’s Internationalism, 1948-1953
- Chapter 3 Résistantes Against the Colonial Order: Women’s Grassroots Diplomacy During the French War in Vietnam (1945-1954)
- Interlude: Asian-African Solidarity
- Chapter 4 Asian Socialism and the Forgotten Architects of Post-Colonial Freedom
- Chapter 5 Where was the Afro in Afro-Asian Solidarity? Africa’s ‘Bandung Moment’
- Chapter 6 Asia as a Third Way? J.C. Kumarappa and the Problem of Development in Asia
- Interlude: The Dead Will Live Eternally
- Chapter 7 Delhi versus Bandung: Local Anti-imperialists and the Afro- Asian Stage
- Chapter 8 Building Egypt’s Afro-Asian Hub: Infrastructures of Solidarity in 1950s Cairo
- Chapter 9 Soviet “Afro-Asians” in UNESCO: Reorienting World History and Humanism
- Chapter 10 A Forgotten Bandung : The Afro-Asian Students’ Conference and the Call for Decolonisation
- Interlude: Yesterday and Today
- Chapter 11 Dispatches from Havana : The Cold War, Afro-Asian Solidarities, and Culture Wars in Pakistan
- Chapter 12 Microphone Revolution : North Korean Cultural Diplomacy During the Liberation of Southern Africa
- Chapter 13 Eqbal Ahmad: An Affective Reading of Afro-Asianism
- Chapter 14 Passports to the Post-colonial World: Space and Mobility in Francisca Fanggidaej’s Afro-Asian Journeys
- Epilogue: Afro-Asianism Revisited
- About the Authors
- Index
Summary
Abstract
This chapter highlights Egyptian contributions to the history of Afro-Asian solidarity, which remain understudied in scholarship on twentieth-century decolonisation, and on Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt. It argues that Egyptian activists and intellectuals worked to build ‘infrastructures of solidarity’ on multiple spatial scales in 1950s Cairo, from Arab to African to Afro-Asian, and engaged in the relational construction of their political imaginaries in the process. Analysing the African Association, the 1957 Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Conference, and the Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Organisation, it shows how state and popular actors’ interactions at such sites produced Cairo as an Afro-Asian hub. Egypt’s case thus offers valuable insights into the nature of popular solidarity networks, and the porousness of state-society boundaries, in contexts of decolonisation.
Keywords: solidarity, Afro-Asianism, decolonisation, national liberation, Egypt, Abdel Nasser
In December 1957, Cairo University played host to an international gathering of unprecedented scale in the colonised world. Representatives from forty-six countries across Asia and Africa spent a week sharing their experiences of colonisation and their aspirations to overcome it. Their closing resolution invoked the Asian- African Conference held two years earlier in Bandung, Indonesia, which they said had ‘set the standard’ with its principles of self-determination, global equality, and peace. Bandung remains preeminent in the lore of Afro-Asianism worldwide, and in historiographies of decolonisation today. Yet the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Conference and its Cairo Declaration were self-consciously a broadening and deepening of the ‘Bandung Spirit’: Cairo’s delegates represented many more countries, most of them yet to achieve independence, and they were not political elites, but activists, unionists, writers, and artists.
This presents two paradoxes for exploration, reflecting the richness of the extraordinary historical process of decolonisation. Firstly, the Cairo Conference delegates celebrated their struggles for national liberation – many were nationalist activists and organisers – but they also greeted each other as Afro-Asians. How did the national and transnational coexist in this context? Secondly, not only were the Cairo Conference delegates unaffiliated with their states, but many had also taken great risks in travelling to Cairo, evading colonial border controls or the surveillance of hostile regimes. Yet it was the Egyptian state that was sponsoring these proceedings, with a senior cabinet minister appointed conference chair.
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- The Lives of Cold War Afro-Asianism , pp. 167 - 190Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2022