How African and Asian Writers Found a Soviet Audience
Throughout the Cold War, Moscow-backed bodies like the Afro-Asian Writers' Association and the Tashkent Film Festival brought writers and filmmakers from across the Third World to the USSR. Their exchanges with their Eastern Bloc counterparts reflected the ambitions and limits of Soviet internationalism.
W. E. B. Du Bois and others with hands linked and raised at the Afro-Asian Writers’ Congress in Tashkent, 1958. (Special Collections and University Archives / University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries)
Could there have been a Third World without the “Second” World built around the Soviet Union? Certainly, yes — but it would have looked very different.
Most histories of these geopolitical blocs, and the societies and cultures that constituted them, are written in terms of their relations with the West. Yet the interdependence of the Second and Third Worlds is clear not only from their nomenclature but also from their near-simultaneous disappearance, around 1990.
Rossen Djagalov’s book From Internationalism to Postcolonialism: Literature and Cinema between the Second and the Third Worlds (McGill-Queens University Press, 2020) addresses this historical blind spot. It tells the story of two Soviet-backed cultural bodies that claimed to represent the Third World project in literature and cinema: the Afro-Asian Writers’ Association (1958–1991) and the Tashkent Festival for African, Asian, and Latin American Film (1968–1988).
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