3 - Third World Crossings' and China-Africa Networks: Visual representation of Africa in Afro-Asian literature

Centered on ‘crossings’, this project proposes a ‘Third World’ cosmopolitanism that crosses national boundaries and the Cold War binary. First and foremost, African and Chinese writers took advantage of the Afro-Asian political connections to undertake travels across large geographical distances. Second, on the textual level, travelogs produced emotional bonds of shared anti-colonial and anti-imperialist sentiments and manifested the ambiguity of Afro-Asianism through silences, absences and discordance within and among these texts. Third, on the circulation level, an Afro-Asian ‘republic of letters’ was built by national and transnational print networks, through which transcontinental solidarity could be read, seen and felt. This paper proposes that a networked approach to the ‘Third World’ enriches official archives of China-Africa connections and brings out the nuances in state-driven narratives, emphasizing the human connection inherent in Afro-Asian solidarity, felt through individual encounters and sometimes fragile emotional bonds. 

A significant component of this project is to collect and analyze non-state archival resources, mainly literary writings. Among them are 49 Chinese language books such as Du Xuan’s West Africa Diary, Feng Zhidan’s Glimpses into West Africa, Han Beiping’s Nights in Africa and Night Drum, as well as 23 issues of the official English-language journal of the Afro-Asian Writers’ Association, whose secretariat was based in Beijing. The research utilizes a dataset of historical images sourced from these books and journals. Through object detection, the study identifies recurring themes, objects, and individuals depicted in these images, shedding light on the visual narratives constructed about Africa during this era