Building Egypt's Afro-Asian Hub: Infrastructures of Solidarity in 1950s Cairo

Abou-El-Fadl, Reem

Abstract

This chapter highlights Egyptian contributions to the history of Afro-Asian solidarity, which remain understudied in scholarship on twentieth-century decolonisation, and on Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt. It argues that Egyptian activists and intellectuals worked to build ‘infrastructures of solidarity’ on multiple spatial scales in 1950s Cairo, from Arab to African to Afro-Asian, and engaged in the relational construction of their political imaginaries in the process. Analysing the African Association, the 1957 Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Conference, and the Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Organisation, it shows how state and popular actors’ interactions at such sites produced Cairo as an Afro-Asian hub. Egypt’s case thus offers valuable insights into the nature of popular solidarity networks, and the porousness of state-society boundaries, in contexts of decolonisation

Citation

Abou-El-Fadl, R. (2022). Building Egypt's Afro-Asian Hub: Infrastructures of Solidarity in 1950s Cairo. In C. Stolte, & S. L. Lewis (Eds.), The Lives of Cold War Afro-Asianism (167-190). Leiden University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9789400604346-010

• Publication Date: Oct 1, 2022
• Deposit Date: Jun 6, 2024
• Pages: 167-190
• Series Title: Global Connections: Routes and Roots
• Series Number: 4
• Book Title: The Lives of Cold War Afro-Asianism
• ISBN: 9789087283889
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9789400604346-010
• Keywords: solidarity, Afro-Asianism, decolonisation, national liberation, Egypt, Abdel Nasser