Building Egypt’s Afro-Asian Hub Infrastructures of Solidarity and the 1957 Cairo Conference

• Published in: Journal of world history Vol. 30; no. 1/2; pp. 157 - 192
• Main Author: ABOU-EL-FADL, REEM
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Honolulu University of Hawai'i Press 01.06.2019; University of Hawaii Press
• Subjects: Activists; Asian cultural groups; Aspiration; Cold War; Colonization; Conferences; Decolonization; Developing countries; Equality; Foreign policy; Founding; Geography; Infrastructure; Infrastructure (Economics); LDCs; Peace; Political activism; Sadat, Anwar; Self determination; Social cohesion; Transnationalism; Middle East; China; Palestinian Territories; Egypt; South Africa; United Kingdom; Algeria; Indonesia; India; Cairo Egypt; Asia; Africa
• ISSN: 1045-6007; 1527-8050; 1527-8050
• DOI: 10.1353/jwh.2019.0016

Despite the recent scholarly recuperation of decolonization struggles, Egyptian contributions to the history of Afro-Asian solidarity remain understudied. Instead, scholarship on Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt has focused on high politics at the Arab regional scale. This article examines the building of ‘infrastructures of solidarity’ on multiple spatial scales in 1950s Cairo, and the interactions of state and popular actors at such sites, which produced Cairo as an Afro-Asian hub. It situates the 1957 Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Conference in this process, alongside the African Association and Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Organization. Drawing on concepts of translocality and generative solidarity, this article argues that Egyptian activists and intellectuals engaged in solidarity practices on Arab, African, and Afro-Asian scales simultaneously, and in the relational construction of their political imaginaries in turn. Egypt’s case thus offers valuable insights into the nature of popular solidarity networks, and the porousness of state-society boundaries, in contexts of decolonization.