In 2022 a group of professors and students, including myself as an MA student at the time, embarked on a project to use Lotus in the classroom at King’s College London. Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings (1968-91) was the trilingual literary magazine of the Afro-Asian Writers Association, a group of writers, editors, illustrators and translators established at the 1958 Tashkent conference in Uzbekistan. Titled ‘Decolonising the Curriculum and Inclusive Pedagogy: Integrating Cultural Production and Decolonial Archives’, the project set out to question and resist colonial legacies and structures of oppression in the classroom using anticolonial archives, specifically Lotus. What did we learn from this project? How did the magazine engage and inspire students, me included, to think and act with the anticolonial histories included in the magazine?
This project took place in the broader context of the movement to decolonise the university. Rooted in anti-racist struggle and practice, this movement has addressed the legacies of colonialism in universities and particularly in Eurocentric curricula. In Britain, student campaigns such as Why is My Curriculum White? and #LiberateMyDegree emerged in 2015, influenced by the Rhodes Must Fall student movement in South Africa. As a result, Global North universities have adopted decolonising initiatives. However, these initiatives often culminate in the tokenistic diversification of curricula, as Eurocentric narratives remain centred while ‘diverse’ voices are contrasted to reaffirm the centrality of European voices. Similarly, Global North universities are seen to facilitate decolonising initiatives while repressing calls for the inherently decolonial Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. Universities have refused to divest from arms manufacturers and cut ties with Israeli universities, which contribute to and benefit from the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, and the deaths of civilians in the West Bank, Lebanon, Iran, Syria and Yemen. Instead, universities have repressed the student movements making those demands.
In our project at KCL, we explored a non-tokenistic approach to decolonising education by using anticolonial archives to exemplify solidarity, both as a historical framework of solidarity and a mode of praxis for us as students today. In the project, we focus on the Lotus archives, but the framework applies to other anticolonial archives and periodicals. Using anticolonial archives pedagogically centres solidarity, or a mobilisation/commitment derived from a recognition of the material connections between different struggles. This is crucial to the understanding and application of decolonisation today, whereas simple diversification fails to consider anticolonial solidarity. By doing so, it disempowers students located in the imperial core because it does not emphasise the connections between the different but shared struggles of students across the world, obscuring the mobilising strength of solidarity. Engagement with anticolonial archives also allows us to connect past and present, tracing a line between the anticolonial struggles of the past and the struggles pertaining to the world today. As students taking part in this project, we were encouraged to engage with the archives by looking at their contents, what is missing, and the contradictions that they present. This helps paint a non-romanticised, nuanced picture of past anticolonial struggle.
The aim of Lotus magazine was to bring together writings from Africa and Asia to advance goals of national liberation, anti-imperialism and Afro-Asian solidarity. Lotus was published in Arabic, French and English weaving multiple communities together. Additionally, Lotus is itself an object of solidarity as its history, movements and developments are entangled in common and shared histories of anticolonial and anti-racist struggle. Lotus was published from Cairo in 1968 and relocated to Beirut during the Arab boycott of Egypt, when former president Anwar El-Sadat made Egypt the first country in the region to recognise Israel as a state after the Camp David Accords in 1978. The editor-in-chief of Lotus at the time was Youssef El-Sibai, Egyptian Minister of Culture from 1973 whose support for Sadat in his visit to Israel and in normalising relations led to Sibai’s assassination in Cyprus by Palestinian militants also in 1978. Its editor-in-chief during the Beirut period was Pakistani revolutionary poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz. Lotus later relocated once more to Tunis due to Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982. After Faiz’s death in 1984 Ziyad Abdel Fattah, a Palestinian writer and politician became the magazine’s editor in chief until its dissolution in 1991, all of which highlights the centrality of political commitment, solidarity and the Palestinian question to Lotus. It is also an example of the contradictions that are often present in anticolonial archives, since people central to anticolonial thinking, especially around Palestine, also contributed to the furthering of the oppression of Palestinians.
Our project embodied a decolonial pedagogical approach rooted in a practice of solidarity. Instead of a top-down hierarchy between teachers in a position of power, and students as learners, we developed a collaborative approach with students and lecturers on an equal footing, namely by mutually creating a toolkit. During the project, as students, we engaged in the worldmaking and political project of Lotus. For example, one student created a playlist with songs about solidarity and national liberation from the period of Lotus’ publication as well as today. This playlist was shared and remains widely listened to by students and others who have heard about it. It triggered the creation of other playlists with similar underlying themes of solidarity. Creative ways of engaging with the anticolonial archive helped further contextualise the magazine and made it more relatable and approachable to us as students. The Lotus project at KCL also produced an exhibition that was co-created by us students and the teaching staff. This exhibition was designed to counteract the ‘gatekeeping’ of academic knowledge as well as promoting solidarity as an accessible and achievable idea and practice. The process itself, including suggestions from students during the project, has introduced the possibility for alternative and decolonial modes of assessment at the university, such as the production of cultural and literary works of our own.
‘Lotus and the Intercontinental’ Spotify playlist by Sudi Ali.
Inspired by Lotus, we had the idea of creating a zine with the theme of Afro-Asian solidarity in the context of the university. With literature and art, Lotus presented alternative voices and bottom-up histories, a different entry point to understanding Afro-Asian solidarity through the periodical as a form promoting decolonisation through cultural exchange. We engaged with Lotus magazine by creating our own, contemporary periodical, through which we could critically engage with themes of solidarity, colonialism and anticolonialism today. Consequently, as explained in our toolkit, ‘Lotus was not discussed as a self-enclosed archive that belongs to a foregone past, but as an open-ended repository of collective knowledge production’. We engaged with Lotus as a tool that was relevant and current, and that would continue to remain helpful for thinking about anticolonial solidarity in its past, present and futures. The anticolonial zine project inspired by Lotus is currently being relaunched at KCL with a focus on Palestinian liberation, highlighting the relevance and usefulness of the periodical form as an expression of collective knowledge and solidarity today.
Today, we are witnessing a revival of anticolonial solidarity in educational environments that we have not seen since the period in which Lotus was published. In the past year, students across the world have mobilised – in the form of encampments, occupations and campaigns – demanding that their universities divest money from companies complicit in Israel’s genocide of Palestinians. Students are citing Palestinian authors, poets and revolutionaries like Ghassan Kanafani and Mahmoud Darwish, who published in Lotus extensively. Anticolonial solidarity chants such as: ‘From London to Palestine, occupation is a crime’, or ‘From the belly of the beast, hands off the Middle East’, can be heard on university campuses. As a tool for teaching and learning in the classroom, looking at the past iterations of solidarity in Lotus encourages students to push forward this wave of solidarity today. Lotus always had a politically committed focus, especially around Palestine – it embodied solidarity in the ways in which it operated in conjunction with its contents. As students, our familiarity with Lotus, its history and contradictions, including the rise and fall of the popularity of its ideas of solidarity allows us to imagine being part of processes of anticolonial solidarity that take on many different lives by being stretched, ruptured and revived across history.
When we engaged with Lotus, we gained a better understanding of the centrality of the question of Palestine to the political engagement of the magazine, and the fact that issues from the 1960s still occur today. As students, we better understand solidarity in our present moment when we recognise the parallels and contrasts between activism today and the wider history of solidarity with Palestine. By studying anticolonial archives, we have found tools with which to organise and create in modes of transnational solidarity in the repressive space of the university. Lotus, and our KCL project, has taught us, as students, to question relations of power and demand more than a ‘decolonised curriculum’ – but decolonial praxis, which means putting what we learn about decolonisation, rooted in anti-racism and solidarity, into practice. Lotus has shown me that this begins with the academic boycott of Israeli universities, and divestment and sanctions on universities complicit in genocide.