World Literature After Empire

Rethinking Universality in the Long Cold War

Pieter Vanhove

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000415476
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Historical Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book makes the case that the idea of a "world" in the cultural and philosophical sense is not an exclusively Western phenomenon. During the Cold War and in the wake of decolonization a plethora of historical attempts were made to reinvent the notions of world literature, world art, and philosophical universality from an anticolonial perspective. Contributing to recent debates on world literature, the postcolonial, and translatability, the book presents a series of interdisciplinary and multilingual case studies spanning Europe, the United States, and China. The case studies illustrate how individual anti-imperialist writers and artists set out to remake the conception of the world in their own image by offering a different perspective centered on questions of race, gender, sexuality, global inequality, and class. The book also discusses how international cultural organizations like the Afro-Asian Writers' Bureau, UNESCO, and PEN International attempted to shape this debate across Cold War divides.

1 China and the Restaging of Afro-Asian World Literature

In October of 1958, the first Afro-Asian Writers’ Conference took place in Tashkent. The country that was then still known as the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic welcomed writers, intellectuals, and officials from across the decolonizing world to its capital. Just a year earlier, at the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organization’s Conference in Cairo, the Afro-Asian Writers’ Bureau or AAWB had been established. “Animated by the spirit of Bandung,” the participants of the 1958 Tashkent Conference declared in their “Appeal to the Writers of the World,” later reprinted in Présence africaine, “we have come together in one place to represent the most beautiful flowerings of our new spirit, unifying and forging a renaissance for 1.5 billion people.”¹ The fledgling Afro-Asian Writers’ Bureau and the movement it embodied was announcing to the rest of the world that a new alliance of writers from recently independent and decolonizing nations had been forged. They were boldly announcing that they were ready to reinvent the very idea of world literature and universal culture from scratch.

Among the writers and officials present at Tashkent were Nikita Khrushchev, Mário de Andrade, and W.E.B. Du Bois, who notably gave a speech titled “I am an American, I am an African.”² What was perhaps the most remarkable presence at the Tashkent Conference was the Chinese delegation. The still relatively young PRC was represented by some of the most established Chinese writers and intellectuals of the time, including Mao Dun, Ba Jin, and Zhou Yang. The People’s Republic wanted to send a strong signal to the other nations present that it had become a force to be reckoned with in the decolonizing world. In his speech at Tashkent, Mao Dun—the canonical realist-naturalist novelist and major proponent of the May Fourth Movement—made a passionate plea for Afro-Asian solidarity and cultural cooperation. After centuries of oppression and exploitation, he argued, it was time for the formerly colonial nations present at the Tashkent Conference to reclaim their rightful spot in the history of world literature:

Since the 18th century, many of our countries were forced to accept the so-called “civilization” of others, and our nations were defamed as “backward.” Our literary treasures were kept outside the treasure trove of world literature [世界文学宝库, shijie wenxue baoku]. Colonialists always want to destroy unity and cultural exchange among the peoples they enslave. Therefore, the task of introducing these treasures among ourselves has been hindered. It is a great regret, then, that at this conference today we still have to introduce our literary histories to one another as if we were new friends!³

Mao Dun’s speech highlighted that world literature did not have to remain a solely Euro-American enterprise that was complicit in colonial oppression: world literature could be reinvented from an Afro-Asian and anticolonial perspective. In this first chapter, I explore the historical and philosophical circumstances of the Afro-Asian Writers’ Bureau’s call to reimagine world literature and universal culture in the wake of decolonization. One of my central arguments here is that the AAWB’s alternative to Euro-American world literature can be read as a performative claim to universality. The AAWB’s claim to literary worldliness operated along the same discursive lines as what Judith Butler has called “competing universalities” (Butler 2000, 163) or alternatively what Pheng Cheah refers to in his book on postcolonial world literature as a “reworlding of the world” (Cheah 2016, 187). The writers of the AAWB were effectively conjuring up a new world that could compete with the Eurocentric model of universal culture and the discursive foundations of colonial oppression. Locating themselves in a direct lineage to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s conception of world literature and universality in the Communist Manifesto, the Afro-Asian writers had, to use Marx and Engels’s expression, a “world to win” [eine Welt zu gewinnen] (Marx and Engels 2015, 52; Marx and Engels 1977, 493)—a world that for centuries had been stolen from them. The Afro-Asian Writers’ Bureau’s call for an alternative conception of universality—and the reinvention of world literature that ensued—not only reveal that it is possible to imagine alternative histories of literary and philosophical worldliness: its history and current-day afterlives also point to the potential pitfalls of counterhegemonic universality-building.

The writers associated with the Afro-Asian movement were not just reimagining world literature in the face of their historical exclusion from Eurocentric philosophical and literary imaginations of the universal. They were simultaneously positioning themselves over against alternative claims to cultural worldliness that were surfacing in the bipolar world of the Cold War. The history of the AAWB was just as much marked by the rivalry between the capitalist and Communist worldviews as it was by the internal struggles that were taking shape East of the Iron Curtain. The role of China is crucial here. The Bureau was rooted in the legacy of the 1955 Bandung Conference and had been envisioned as the main cultural exponent of the Afro-Asian solidarity movement. The Bandung Conference can be read as a symbolic marker and milestone of the broader history of decolonization (Chakrabarty 2010). Bandung had brought together widely disparaging political factions from both recently independent, formerly colonial nations like India, and mostly African countries that were on their way to independence. As a singular moment in a decades-long history, Bandung did not however encompass the myriad histories that together tell the story of decolonization. For one, Bandung’s pleas for Afro-Asian solidarity were often marred by internal struggles, as Antoinette Burton (2016) has argued. What Bandung did signal, from a historical perspective, was the increasingly important role of the People’s Republic as an actor in the decolonizing world. The changing role of China in the Afro-Asian Writers’ Bureau reflected these historical shifts. China sailed a progressively independent course in the AAWB and ended up promoting a singularly Chinese conception of universality and world literature as part of its emerging foreign policy and cultural diplomacy in the decolonizing world. Relying on Chinese archival materials that document the PRC’s contributions to the AAWB, I discuss below how China went from embracing the Soviet vision for a “socialist-realist world literature” in the 1950s, to a more aggressive and independent strategy of cultural diplomacy in the wake of the Sino-Soviet Split, to in the end entirely divorcing the AAWB from its Soviet influences during the Cultural Revolution. China’s progressive takeover of the Afro-Asian Writers’ Bureau can ultimately be said to have laid the foundations for its ever-expanding cultural and socio-political influence in current-day Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

Socialist-Realist World Literature

The leader of the Chinese delegation at the Afro-Asian Writers’ Conference in Tashkent was the literary theorist Zhou Yang. His speech, titled “Eliminate the Influence of Colonialism on Culture and Develop the Exchange of Eastern and Western Cultures,” echoed many of the premises of Mao Dun’s remarks at the Conference. Like Mao Dun, Zhou Yang believed that it was time for formerly colonized and oppressed nations to engage in mutual cultural exchange in an effort to undo centuries of cultural colonialism. What set his analysis apart from Mao Dun’s, was his strong emphasis on the notion of “national culture” or minzu wenhua (民族文化), which he saw as the basis for a new world literature buttressed by Afro-Asian cultural solidarity. With the term “national culture,” Zhou Yang was suggesting that after centuries of colonial exploitation the most important priority for recently independent nations was to establish a new national literary and artistic canon. The best way to implement this vision was through increased cultural cooperation with other decolonizing nations. “National culture,” he stated at the outset of his speech, “is the fruit of national spiritual labor, as well as the common wealth of mankind [人类共同的财富, renlei gongtong de caifu]. It tends to communicate with other national cultures, and further enrich itself through this exchange.”⁴ Zhou Yang was implying, in other words, that standing in solidarity with other Afro-Asian nations in the name of a reclaimed cultural universality would place those individual countries in a stronger position when it came to ridding their emerging national cultures of their colonial and imperialist influences.

In his speech at Tashkent, Zhou Yang also proposed a radical re-reading of Goethe’s famous 1827 conversation with Eckermann—the urtext of current-day disciplinary World Literature in the West. A defiant Zhou Yang unpacked Goethe’s statements that “poetry is the universal possession of mankind,” that “national literature is now rather an unmeaning term,” and that “the epoch of world literature [Weltliteratur] is at hand” (Goethe and Eckerman 1850, 350–351; Goethe and Eckerman 1885, 224), which he all quoted in Chinese translation. Zhou Yang then put forward that, with these statements, Goethe was not setting out to eradicate the notion of national literature. What Goethe implied with his prediction that world literature was at hand, Zhou Yang argued, was that national traditions would remain central in the new age of universal literature. According to Zhou Yang, Goethe believed that—rather than having to overcome national tradition entirely—it was necessary to outgrow “the narrow concept of treating one’s own national literature as if it were the only literature in the world.”⁵ Zhou Yang took Goethe’s predictions to mean that national literature should continue to develop itself by opening itself up to other national literatures, that one should “enrich one’s own culture by absorbing (吸收, xishou) the advantages that other cultures bring.”⁶ As Duncan M. Yoon has argued, participants to the Tashkent Conference like Zhou Yang placed the push for a renewal of individual national cultures and world literature on the same level because they “viewed national cultural movements as a means through which to rehabilitate the category of humanism on a global scale” (Yoon 2015, 241). Effectively, Zhou Yang was rewriting the foundational text of the field of World Literature to tell an entirely new story. His story was one of anticolonial, Afro-Asian literary solidarity and a renewal of universal culture. World literature was to be uprooted and replanted in nascent national traditions that had to be stripped of their colonial legacy.

Zhou Yang went on to clarify what exactly he meant by opening up one’s national literature to other national traditions. In a move that was at the time still in tune with China’s geopolitical commitments and official foreign policy, Zhou inscribed his plea for cultural collaboration and his radically new vision for world literature in the broader context of the by then already struggling Sino-Soviet alliance. “We now have a plan,” he stated towards the end of his speech, “for large-scale cultural exchange between peoples. … First and foremost, we learn from the long experience of our great socialist neighbor, the Soviet Union, the first socialist country on earth to abolish the exploitation of man by man.”⁷ Zhou Yang was echoing a widespread view in China at the time that the Soviet Union was still very much the country of reference that set the agenda for the entire socialist, and by extension decolonizing, world. Soviet cultural policy and Soviet aesthetic guidelines, Zhou Yang argued, would enrich the fledgling national cultures of formerly colonized nations and form the backbone of a new, revolutionary world literature (Figures 1.1 and 1.2).

Figure 1.1 W. E. B. Du Bois, Shirley Graham Du Bois, Majhemout Diop, Zhou Yang and Mao Dun at the Afro-Asian Writers Conference in Tashkent, October 1958. W. E. B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312). Courtesy of Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries.

Figure 1.2 W. E. B. Du Bois speaking with Mao Dun and other unidentified Chinese delegates at Afro-Asian Writers Conference, Tashkent, October 1958. W. E. B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312). Courtesy of Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries.

Zhou Yang’s admiration for Soviet cultural policy was rooted in his earlier theoretical work on the socialist-realist style and the question of how literature could be a means towards achieving world revolution. His influential essay “Socialist Realism: The Way Forward for Chinese Literature,” which was first published in the Russian literary journal Znamia (Banner) in 1952, advocated for a Chinese embrace of the national literary and artistic style at first promoted and later strictly enforced by Soviet cultural organizations and government institutions. “Socialist realism,” Zhou Yang claimed in this essay, “has become the banner of all the progressive writers of the world, and the Chinese people’s literature is moving forward under this banner. Just as China’s new democratic revolution is a part of the proletarian socialist world revolution, the Chinese people’s literature is also part of socialist-realist world literature [世界社会主义现实主义文学, shijie shehuizhuyi xianshizhuyi wenxue].”⁸ Soviet-style socialist realism, in other words, would form a solid basis on which to construct what Zhou Yang called a new “socialist-realist world literature” that could, in turn, provide a fertile ideological feeding ground for world-political change—a counterhegemonic vision recently described by Nicolai Volland as one embodying a “socialist cosmopolitanism” (Volland 2017).

Many of the key insights of Zhou Yang’s earlier writings on Soviet socialist realism were echoed in his ulterior speech at Tashkent. At the first AAWB Conference, the Chinese Communist Party’s most prominent literary theorist would once again claim that the main priority of the Chinese was to ensure that a national literature could thrive after centuries of obstructions caused by colonial exploitation. The key to achieving this goal was to build such a new national culture on the basis of insights borrowed from other cultures that were establishing themselves in the face of historical oppression. If the Soviet experience was often at odds with Chinese history, for Zhou Yang the Soviet model of socialist realism was clearly one aspect the Chinese national tradition could incorporate as it sought to work out its own future on the world stage. Soviet socialist realism was one of the advances in literary technique and style that could rid modern Chinese literature of its colonial influences. It was the gold standard of the new world literature that he was env...