Lotus (magazine)

Lotus was a trilingual political and cultural magazine which existed between 1968 and 1991. The magazine with three language editions was published in different countries: Egypt, Lebanon, Tunisia and German Democratic Republic. It contained one of the early postcolonial literary criticisms employing non-Eurocentric modes.[1]

Lotus
Editor
Categories
  • Political magazine
  • Cultural magazine
FrequencyQuarterly
FounderAfro-Asian Writers' Association
Founded1968
First issueMarch 1968
Final issue1991
Country
Based in
Language
OCLC269235327

History and profile

The first issue of the magazine appeared in March 1968 with the title Afro-Asian Writings.[2][3] The magazine was established by the Afro-Asian Writers' Association (AAWA).[4][5] Its foundation was first proposed at the Association's inaugural meeting held in Tashkent, Soviet Union, in 1958.[6] The goal of the magazine was to support the Afro-Asian solidarity and nonalignment which had been stated in the Bandung Conference in 1955.[7] It was published on a quarterly basis and had three language editions: Arabic, English, and French.[2][8] Of them the English edition was started first[9] and the Arabic edition was initially headquartered in Cairo.[10] The other two were published in the German Democratic Republic.[11][12] The magazine was financed by Egypt, the Soviet Union and the German Democratic Republic.[11] In 1970 the magazine was renamed as Lotus with the subtitle Afro-Asian Writings[2] from the sixth issue.[9][13] The permanent bureau of the AAWA in Cairo was its publisher until 1973.[1]

Lotus contained the sections of "studies", "short stories", "poetry", "art", "book reviews" and "documents.[9] The first issue of the magazine featured an article by Léopold Sédar Senghor and Yusuf Sibai, founding editor of the magazine, which was about the meaning of the African identity.[14] The magazine published the text of a talk by Ghassan Kanafani on resistance literature presented at the Soviet-sponsored Afro-Asian Writers' Association conference held in Beirut in March 1967.[15]

On 18 February 1978 Yusuf Sibai was assassinated in Nicosia, Cyprus,[16] and Pakistani writer Faiz Ahmad Faiz assumed the post.[4][12] He remained as the editor of the Lotus until his death in 1984[12] and was succeeded by Ziyad Abdel Fattah in the post.[17] Fattah edited the magazine until its closure.[9]

The headquarters of the Arabic edition was in Cairo until October 1978 and was moved to Beirut following the sign of the Camp David Accords.[6][11] In Beirut the Union of Palestinian Writers published the magazine which remained there until the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982.[11] Then the magazine together with the Palestine Liberation Organization moved to Tunis, Tunisia, but soon after was relocated to Cairo.[4][11] The English and French editions of the magazine disappeared in the mid-1980s.[7] The Arabic edition of Lotus folded in 1991[2] after the collapse of the Soviet Union ending its financial support.[13][18]

Contributors

Although the contributors were mostly Arab writers from Palestine, Lebanon, Egypt, Algeria and Sudan who were the members of the Afro-Asian Writers' Association,[5] there were also non-Arab editors from various countries, including Pakistan, Senegal, South Africa, Japan, India, Mongolia and the Soviet Union.[4] Major contributors of Lotus included Mahmoud Darwish, Ghassan Kanafani, Adunis, Edward El Kharrat, Mulk Raj Anand, Ousmane Sembène, Alex La Guma, Hiroshi Noma, Anatoly Sofronov, Ahmed Sékou Touré and Agostinho Neto.[4]

Views and legacy

Lotus billed itself as a "militant" periodical opposing the "cultural imperialism" and attempting to achieve a "revolution of construction."[9] Its contributors considered the 20 century as a period of the new colonialism which made use of the commodification of culture accompanied by the expansion of the global marketplace.[3] They opposed the economic imperialism which had penetrated into the cultural sphere.[3] The magazine fully supported the view that the Soviet Union should be modeled by other nations in that it achieved a cultural and social condition which minority groups and their cultural heritage were respected.[18] It was also argued that the Soviet Union had higher levels of educational and economic development, gender equality and respect for artists.[18]

Lotus paid a special attention to the Vietnamese and Palestinian writing and emphasized the similarity between them in terms of revolutionary movements.[1]

Some issues of the Arabic edition have been archived at American University of Beirut.[4]

In 2016 a magazine with the same title was launched by the Association of African, Asian and Latin American Writers in Lebanon.[2]

See also

References
  1. Rebecca C. Johnson (2021). "Cross-Revolutionary Reading: Visions of Vietnam in the Transnational Arab Avant-Garde". Comparative Literature. 73 (3): 366, 368. doi:10.1215/00104124-8993990.
  2. "Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings" (in French). Global Journals Portal. Retrieved 24 October 2021.
  3. Nesrine Chahine (2017). Marketplaces of The Modern: Egypt As Marketplace In Twentieth-Century Anglo-Egyptian Literature (PhD thesis). University of Pennsylvania. p. 116.
  4. Firoze Manji (3 March 2014). "The Rise and Significance of Lotus". CODESRIA. Archived from the original on 9 June 2021. Retrieved 24 October 2021.
  5. Jens Hanssen; Hicham Safieddine (Spring 2016). "Lebanon's al-Akhbar and Radical Press Culture: Toward an Intellectual History of the Contemporary Arab Left". The Arab Studies Journal. 24 (1): 196. JSTOR 44746852.
  6. M.J. Ernst; Rossen Djagalov (2022). "The Road to Lotus: Faiz Ahmad Faiz's Magazine Proposal to the Soviet Writers Union". Interventions. International Journal of Postcolonial Studies: 1–20. doi:10.1080/1369801X.2021.2015701. S2CID 252802903.
  7. Monica Popescu (2020). At Penpoint. African Literatures, Postcolonial Studies, and the Cold War. Durham; London: Duke University Press. p. 48. doi:10.1515/9781478012153. ISBN 978-1-4780-0940-5.
  8. Elizabeth M. Holt (Fall 2019). "Al-Ṭayyib Ṣāliḥ's Season of Migration to the North, the CIA, and the Cultural Cold War after Bandung". Research in African Literatures. 50 (3): 72. doi:10.2979/reseafrilite.50.3.07. S2CID 216711624.
  9. Maryam Fatima (August 2022). "Institutionalizing Afro-Asianism: Lotus and the (Dis)Contents of Soviet-Third World Cultural Politics". Comparative Literature Studies. 59 (3): 450, 453. doi:10.5325/complitstudies.59.3.0447. S2CID 251852541.
  10. Nida Ghouse (15 June 2014). "Lotus Notes: Part Two A". Mada Masr. Retrieved 24 October 2021.
  11. Nida Ghouse (October 2016). "Lotus Notes". ARTMargins. 5 (3): 82–91. doi:10.1162/ARTM_a_00159. S2CID 57558937.
  12. Sumayya Kassamali (31 May 2016). ""You Had No Address"". Caravan Magazine. Retrieved 24 October 2021.
  13. Hala Halim (2012). "Lotus, the Afro-Asian Nexus, and Global South Comparatism". Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. 32 (3): 566. doi:10.1215/1089201x-1891570.
  14. Sophia Azeb (Fall 2019). "Crossing the Saharan Boundary: Lotus and the Legibility of Africanness". Research in African Literatures. 50 (3): 91. doi:10.2979/reseafrilite.50.3.08. S2CID 216745713.
  15. Elizabeth M. Holt (2021). "Resistance Literature and Occupied Palestine in Cold War Beirut". Journal of Palestine Studies. 50 (1): 3–4. doi:10.1080/0377919X.2020.1855933. S2CID 233302736.
  16. "Youssef El Sebai". State Information Service. 20 July 2009. Archived from the original on 24 October 2021. Retrieved 24 October 2021.
  17. "Rossen Djagalov. The Afro-Asian Writers Association and Its Literary Field". syg.ma. 15 July 2021. Archived from the original on 12 July 2022. Retrieved 12 July 2022.
  18. Peter J. Kalliney (2022). The Aesthetic Cold War. Princeton, NJ; Oxford: Princeton University Press. pp. 82–84. doi:10.1515/9780691230641-005. ISBN 9780691230641.
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