Introduction
By the time of the Bandung Conference in 1955[1], Negritude had already been active for more than a decade. Emerging in the early 1930s, Negritude is generally associated with three French-speaking Black writers who met in Paris while pursuing their studies: Aimé Césaire from Martinique, Léopold Sédar Senghor from Senegal, and Léon-Gontran Damas from French Guiana (Galafa, 2018). Their shared experiences as colonial subjects from the Caribbean and Africa led them to develop a literary project of self-reclamation as a form of anti-colonial resistance. At the time, this resistance formed part of a broader Global South internationalism, expressed through movements such as Pan-Africanism and Tricontinentalism. While Pan-Africanism advocated the promotion of unity, solidarity, and self-determination among Africans and African diasporas—much like Negritude itself—Tricontinentalism emerged to connect the Afro-Asian solidarity forged at Bandung with Latin American liberation movements, with the aim of building a cohesive and global resistance to imperialism (Barbosa, 2016; Reis, 2018; Reis & Resende, 2023). Negritude’s critique of colonialism was expressed through poetry, essays, and other literary forms that celebrated Black cultures and civilizations while forcefully denouncing Western and colonial hegemony (Selao, 2022). From the 1930s to the 1960s, African and Caribbean literary spaces served as particularly fertile ground for this intellectual insurgency. This period witnessed the publication of major works such as Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land and Discourse on Colonialism, Senghor’s Shadow Songs and Ethiopiques, and Damas’s Pigments-Névralgies, among others.
The points of convergence between Negritude and the Afro-Asian Writers’ Bureau appeared at several levels. In the same year that Césaire published the second edition of Discourse on Colonialism (1955), the Asian-African Conference convened in Bandung, Indonesia. This gathering marked the foundation for what later became the Afro-Asian People’ Solidarity Organization (AAPSO), founded in Cairo, Egypt, in 1957. Like Negritude, AAPSO took a firm stand against colonialism and imperialism, gradually facilitating coordinated Afro-Asian literary and cultural collaboration. With the establishment of the Bureau in Colombo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), writers from Africa and Asia joined forces around a common objective: dismantling colonial domination across the two continents. The Bureau was thus conceived as a means of transforming literature into an instrument of anti-colonial struggle, promoting solidarity among African and Asian writers, and decolonizing culture through the rejection of European literary authority (Yoon, 2014). It also sought to support national liberation movements, encourage socially engaged writing, foster translation and exchanges among Afro-Asian cultures, and contribute to redefining world literature from the perspective of the formerly colonized Global South (Nabolsy, 2020).
The spirit that animated the creation of the Bureau was therefore fully aligned with the broader vision of a united Third World political bloc—the geopolitical condition that underpinned Afro-Asianism during this period (Reis & Resende, 2019, 2023). Its emergence also echoed the ideological foundations of Negritude, which had contributed to global opposition to European fascism and helped shape the anti-colonial dynamics that would later animate Bandung (Kelley, 2000). Unsurprisingly, the Bandung Conference quickly attracted the attention of Negritude thinkers. Senghor was the first to respond publicly and enthusiastically to the event during the First International Congress of Black Writers and Artists, held at the Sorbonne in 1956:
Whether we like it or not, 1955 will remain a significant date in world history, and above all in the history of people of color. Bandung will henceforth serve as a rallying symbol for these people… The spirit of Bandung resides in the determination demonstrated by Afro-Asian people to strengthen, through its affirmation, their own identity so as not to arrive empty-handed at the “rendezvous of giving and receiving.” (Senghor, 1956, p. 51)
As Yoon (2014) points out, although Senghor did not attend the conference, he emphasized its significance for Negritude within an emerging transnational landscape. Likewise, Yoon notes that Aimé Césaire was also absent from the event, yet Frantz Fanon’s speech at a subsequent meeting of the Afro-Asian People’ Solidarity Organization (AAPSO) in Conakry, Guinea, echoed Césaire’s call in Discourse on Colonialism for “a humanism on the scale of the world” (Césaire, 1955, p. 54). This convergence between Bandung and Negritude was made possible precisely because both emerged within a global wave of decolonization and resistance that swept across Africa, Asia, and Latin America (Kelley, 2000). Well before the establishment of AAPSO, Negritude writers had already recognized the need for a united front among oppressed people and had denounced colonial and imperial domination in the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia (Galafa, 2018).
Corzani (1970) argues that the Caribbean constituted an early center of resistance to Western cultural oppression and, as such, produced some of the first spokespersons for what would later be termed the Third World. He further maintains that the very essence of “Negritude” stems from the Caribbean—and particularly the Martinican—quest for an authentic identity (Corzani, 1970). It is within this historical and ideological context that we view Negritude as part of the internationalism to which the Afro-Asian Writers’ Bureau belonged, and therefore as embodying many of the Bureau’s literary and cultural objectives. Through an analysis of African and Caribbean Negritude texts published between the 1950s and the 1970s, we demonstrate how various forms of Afro-Asian solidarity may have drawn inspiration from the formalization of such alliances at Bandung.
Iconic Figures and Themes of Negritude
To further substantiate our argument through the thematic correspondences between Negritude literature and Afro-Asian solidarity, it is important to revisit briefly the origins of Negritude. As early as the 1920s, writers associated with the movement were engaged in a variety of anti-colonial literary activities across the Caribbean and Africa. In the Caribbean, the epicenter of Negritude was located in the French Antilles. Martinique, in particular, witnessed the emergence of Aimé and Suzanne Césaire, who contributed to L’Étudiant noir and later founded the journal Tropiques (1941), two major literary forums for Black and African voices. While Aimé Césaire’s work has often become virtually synonymous with Negritude, Suzanne Roussi Césaire also made distinct and substantial contributions to the movement, notably through essays such as Malaise d’une civilisation (1942) and Le Grand camouflage (1945), both published in Tropiques (Sharpley-Whiting, 2002).
The launch of Tropiques was supported by a group of Martinican writers that included René Ménil, Lucie Thésée, Aristide Maugée, and Georges Gratiant. In Paris, where the three founders of Negritude first met, another influential circle of Martinican intellectuals formed around the Nardal sisters—Paulette, Jane, and Andrée—founders of La Revue du monde noir (Sharpley-Whiting, 2002). They hosted a literary salon in Clamart, south of Paris, which brought together Black intellectuals living in or passing through the French capital. As activists and intellectuals, the Nardal sisters played a significant role in promoting Black intellectual and cultural consciousness (The Conversation, 2024). Fluent in English, Paulette Nardal served as a crucial cultural mediator between writers of the Harlem Renaissance and French-speaking students from Africa and the Caribbean, among whom were the future founders of Negritude (Banoum, n.d.). Major figures of the Harlem Renaissance present in Paris during this period included Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, and Richard Wright.
Another group of Martinican intellectuals, including Étienne Léro, René Ménil, J. M. Monnerot, and Pierre and Simone Yoyotte, published a single issue of Légitime Défense (1932), a radical pro-Black literary journal that celebrated African American writers such as Hughes and McKay while vigorously denouncing racism (Kelley, 2000, p. 12). Another important Martinican figure is René Maran, author of Batouala (1921), whom Léopold Sédar Senghor regarded as a precursor of Negritude (Heiniger, 2022). While serving as a civil servant in the French Ministry of Colonies, Maran denounced in this novel the abuses of the colonial administration and the evils of imperialism.
Also within the Caribbean sphere, Damas, who came from French Guiana and co-founded Negritude alongside Césaire and Senghor, made a major contribution to the movement. His works, which celebrated African identity while denouncing colonial Europe, were published in La Revue du monde noir (1931–1932) as well as in his own poetry collections. In Africa, the continent envisioned by Negritude as a cultural and historical homeland, Senghor, a native of Senegal, played a fundamental role in the development of the movement from its inception. He later provided a more systematic theorization of Negritude in essays and books such as Liberté, tome I : Négritude et humanisme, where he states that “Negritude has no other ambition than to contribute to twentieth-century Humanism” (Senghor, 1977, p. 66). The movement also benefited from the support of other African writers and intellectuals, including the Senegalese poet David Diop, whose only poetry collection, Hammer Blows (1956), constitutes one of the most militant expressions of Negritude, as well as the Ivorian writer Bernard Binlin Dadié, among others.
Although the Nardal sisters, Roussi-Césaire, Thésée, and Yoyotte were already active during this pioneering phase of Negritude, their contributions as women of the movement remained largely overlooked by literary scholars and readers until the late 1990s, for various reasons. Roussi-Césaire and Thésée were often regarded primarily as Caribbean Surrealists following André Breton’s arrival in Martinique in 1941 (Sharpley-Whiting, 2002). However, Moïse (2021, p. 246) attributes the erasure of these women to what she describes as a condition of “double colonization experienced by Black women through race and gender.” As Paulette Nardal would later affirm, “Césaire and Senghor took up the ideas we had championed and expressed them with far greater brilliance. We were only women. We blazed the trail for the men” (Bertin Elisabeth, 2021, p. 1).
In addition to the literary figures discussed above, several publications played a decisive role in promoting racial consciousness and in developing reflections on Black identity. As Reis (2018) argues, these efforts were driven by a desire to overcome the enduring legacies of colonialism, slavery, and racism. Among these anti-colonial publications were La Voix des Nègres, Les Continents (1924), La Race nègre (1927), L’Ouvrier nègre, Ainsi parla l’oncle, La Dépêche africaine (1928), Le Cri des Nègres and Revue indigène (1931) (Banoum, n.d.). These journals and newspapers fostered debates on race and identity among Francophone Black intellectuals and contributed to the emergence of Negritude. These literary activities are inseparable from Présence Africaine, the influential anti-colonial publishing house based in Dakar and Paris, which provided an essential institutional framework for much of Negritude’s literary production (Reis, 2018).
Although Negritude’s primary concern was the revalorization of Black culture, its literary production nevertheless reveals multiple sites of Afro-Asian solidarity. The movement was deeply influenced by the Harlem Renaissance, and among the African American writers who interacted with Negritude intellectuals in Paris, Richard Wright notably attended the Bandung Conference as an observer and journalist before publishing The Color Curtain (Broche, 2023). W. E. B. Du Bois, often regarded as one of the principal architects of the intellectual life of the Harlem Renaissance, also attempted to attend the conference but was prevented from doing so when the United States government confiscated his passport; nevertheless, he sent messages of support to the conference (Spahr, 2018). Likewise, Senghor’s remarks on Bandung during the Sorbonne Congress testify to the importance he attached to the event for Afro-Asian people and, more broadly, for people of color. Finally, the publication of journals such as Lotus and The Call by the Afro-Asian Writers’ Bureau between the 1960s and the 1980s reinforces our argument that a convergence existed between Negritude and Bandung beyond mere thematic coincidence. Through Negritude texts, one can observe a celebration of Afro-Asian identities, a narration of shared experiences of suffering, and a call for collective resistance, as well as a valorization of subaltern forms of knowledge and civilizations—all elements that directly resonate with the objectives of the Afro-Asian Writers’ Bureau.
Afro-Asian Literary Constructions of Identity
Senghor’s observations on Afro-Asian identities in relation to the Bandung Conference bring us back to Negritude’s central concern with a poetics of identity. In much the same way that the Afro-Asian Writers’ Bureau sought to decolonize culture through the rejection of European literary authority, it is no coincidence that Senghor juxtaposed, in his writings, the identities of people from seemingly distant regions. His recognition of Bandung’s significance confirms what a close reading of certain Negritude texts reveals: the construction of Afro-Asian identities. These texts reaffirm both Black and Asian histories, cultures, and traditions, thereby rejecting Western cultural impositions on dominated people. As Senghor would later assert, if Negritude was “the sum total of the cultural values of the Black world,” it was also “essentially a relationship with others, an openness to the world, contact and participation with others[2]” (Senghor, 2013, p. 28).
Afro-Asian identities begin to emerge in Césaire’s expressions of pride, notably in the poem “Qui donc, qui donc,” from the collection Cadastre (1961). In this text, the Martinican poet celebrates several Asian islands:
and if I needed an island
Borneo / Sumatra / Maldives / Laccadives
if I needed a / Timor scented with sandalwood
or the / Moluccas / Ternate / Tidore
or / Celebes or / Ceylon
who, in the vast enchanted night,
with the teeth of a triumphant comb,
would comb the ebb and the flow. (Césaire, 1961, p. 73)
Similar references to Asian territories, often juxtaposed with Africa, recur throughout the work of Engelbert Mveng, the Cameroonian priest and Negritude writer. Etoa (2009) notes that Mveng was “the bard of intercultural dialogue and fraternity across racial boundaries,” particularly in his most celebrated poetry collection, Balafon (1972). Throughout the collection, he celebrates Africa alongside Asia, referring to numerous Asian territories. This is evident in the poem “À Kong Fu Zi,” where he writes: “And I am Fuji-Yama crowned with the snows of Hondo / I am the springtime of flowered kimonos / I am the Philippines” (Mveng, 1972, p. 6).
As an African writer, Mveng’s identification with Eastern territories reflects his representation of Asia as a symbolic counterpart to Africa, a phenomenon that may be linked to the politics of Afro-Asian solidarity that characterized the Cold War period in the 1970s (Galafa & Gonondo, 2025). This form of self-portraiture within Negritude once again attests to the movement’s affinity with one of the fundamental objectives of the Afro-Asian Writers’ Bureau: the promotion of Afro-Asian literary solidarity.
Subverting Colonial Domination: Shared Suffering and Resistance
Beyond the revalorization of Black cultures and, as we have shown, of Afro-Asian cultures and civilizations, Negritude, as an anti-colonial literary front, also denounces the forms of oppression perpetrated by Western imperialism and colonialism. However, as with its treatment of identity, the scope of this denunciation extends beyond the Black world alone (the Americas, Africa, and the Caribbean) to encompass the colonized and oppressed Afro-Asian world as a whole. From Indochina to the Caribbean by way of Africa, recurring spatial motifs run throughout Negritude texts. The voices of the colonized thus converge in a common call for freedom across the colonial empire. As Galafa (2018) observes, this convergence corresponds to the moment when the oppressed recognize the shared nature of their suffering and consequently unite to liberate themselves from a common enemy.
To express this unity, Negritude writers advocated the liberation of oppressed people on a global scale, rather than merely that of Black populations in Africa and the Caribbean. At the height of the movement, these authors engaged with the suffering of other colonized or occupied territories, especially in Asia (Galafa, 2022). A particularly compelling illustration of this unified Afro-Asian bloc appears in David Diop’s only poetry collection, Coups de pilons (1956). In the poem “Vagues,” Diop invokes the imagery of the Suez Canal through the figure of the dockworker, as well as that of Vietnam through the “coolie” of Hanoi. Both locations were emblematic of anti-imperialist resistance in the mid-twentieth century because of the political struggles associated with the Suez Crisis and the Vietnam War. In this poem, Diop celebrates the emergence of the subaltern in its confrontation with Western hegemony:
The furious waves of freedom
Crash, crash against the frenzied Beast
From yesterday’s slave a fighter is born
And the dockworker of Suez and the coolie of Hanoi
All those intoxicated with fatalism
Raise their immense song amid the waves
The furious waves of freedom
That crash, crash against the frenzied Beast. (Diop, 1956, p. 16)
Diop portrays the transformation of the oppressed into active agents of resistance. The frenzied Beast, a figure of the colonizer, receives this lesson through two major geopolitical references from the 1950s. On the one hand, the Suez Canal Crisis constituted a decisive confrontation between the Third World—represented by Egypt and other Arab nations—and Western imperial hegemony, culminating in the Anglo-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt in 1956, the very year in which the collection was originally published.
On the other hand, Coups de pilon appeared one year after the outbreak of the Vietnam War, a conflict that pitted South Vietnam, backed by the United States, against North Vietnam, supported in particular by the Soviet Union and China. During this period, Negritude literature, much like that of writers affiliated with the Afro-Asian Writers’ Bureau, frequently expressed sympathy for liberation struggles aligned with the communist bloc because of their shared opposition to imperialism and colonialism. Africa itself had become a major site of anti-colonial contestation, and Vietnamese resistance was widely admired within Afro-Asian solidarity circles (Afro-Asian Bulletin, 1962). In “Vagues,” Diop thus pays tribute to subaltern spaces that confronted Western domination, particularly Egypt in Africa and Vietnam in Asia.
The parallels that Diop draws between Vietnamese resistance and African struggles also emerge in another poem, “L’agonie des chaînes.” There, he evokes both suffering and resilience, introducing the image of the “Vietnamese lying in the rice paddy” (p. 13), an allusion to death and sacrifice in the context of the Vietnam War. The African world, for its part, is represented in the line “To the convict of the Congo, brother of the lynched man of Atlanta” (p. 13). The “convict of the Congo” refers to the atrocities of the Belgian colonial regime while more broadly symbolizing the suffering of the African continent under colonial domination. The “lynched man of Atlanta,” meanwhile, evokes anti-Black racism and racial violence in the United States, particularly lynching—forms of oppression that led several figures of the Harlem Renaissance to seek refuge in France (Banoum, n.d.). In another poem, “Témoignage,” Diop (1956) crystallizes his Afro-Asian protest even more forcefully when he writes: “I was not born to manufacture Death / From the Asian jungles to the banks of the Niger” (p. 45).
The motif of a united Afro-Asian front also appears in Césaire’s seminal essay Discours sur le colonialisme, in which he condemns colonial practices in the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia. Césaire thus asserts that “One can kill in Indochina, torture in Madagascar, imprison in Black Africa, crack down in the West Indies,” while emphasizing that “the colonized now know that they have an advantage over the colonialists: they know that their temporary masters are lying” and that “their masters are weak” (Césaire, 1955, p. 8). In this essay, Césaire portrays Western civilization as morally corrupt and on the verge of collapse because of its own colonial inhumanity.
References to Asian suffering also appear in Léon Gontran Damas’s collection Pigments–Névralgies. Beyond its central concern with Black racial identity and colonial trauma, the collection also contains significant allusions to the experiences of oppression endured by Asians. In the poem “Réalités,” for example, Damas places “Jews” and “Asians” side by side as figures of collective survival and resistance: “For having done nothing until now / destroyed / built / dared / in the manner of the Jew / of the Yellow Man / toward the mass organized escape / from inferiority” (Damas, 1972, p. 71). Elsewhere in the same collection, he draws on colonial racial stereotypes associated with Chinese people in order to evoke the broader denigration experienced by colonized people. Thus, in the poem “Regards,” he writes: “When, in later years /… / I shall have / false Chinese eyes” (pp. 69–70). Read alongside “Réalités,” these images point to a shared racialization of colonized subjects. Like Césaire and Diop, Damas thus recognizes Afro-Asian affinities and mobilizes them as a rallying point in the struggle against hegemonic domination. As Galafa (2018) argues, because many territories in Africa, the Antilles, the Caribbean, and Asia were colonized by France, and because of the presence of diasporic populations in the Americas, cooperation among the oppressed became both inevitable and politically significant. Negritude consequently intensified its struggle against imperialism through the unification of oppressed people across the colonial empire.
Subaltern Knowledge and Civilizations
The revalorization of the knowledge systems and civilizations of formerly colonized and dominated people constitutes another defining feature of Negritude literature. In Can the Subaltern Speak? (1988), Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak conceptualizes the colonized subject as a subaltern whose voice is erased by the overarching and infantilizing narratives of the (post)colonial West. Although her formulation takes the form of a rhetorical question, Negritude responds to it by writing back to the colonial Empire. It thus emerges as a space for the celebration of subaltern knowledge and civilizations across Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia, which together constitute the Afro-Asian sphere. This commitment to the revalorization of subaltern cultures and civilizations resonates directly with the objectives of the Afro-Asian Writers’ Bureau, which, as the cultural wing of the OSPAA, regarded the mobilization of culture and civilization as integral components of a transnational humanism (Yoon, 2014, p. 19).
Aimé Césaire once again occupies a central place here through his sustained celebration of Afro-Asian philosophies and civilizations. In Discours sur le colonialisme, he recalls the major contributions of Afro-Asian civilizations to world history, explicitly invoking the Sudanese empires, the Benin Bronzes, and the statuary of Shango (Césaire, 1955, p. 30), as well as Egyptian geometry, Assyrian astronomy, the emergence of chemistry among Arab scholars, and the development of rationalism within Islam (Césaire, 1955, p. 50). Césaire thus asserts that “the idea of the barbaric Negro is a European invention” (p. 30), a position that echoes Edward Said’s (1978) critique of Orientalism as a Western construction of the Other. In this sense, Césaire challenges Western epistemology, which disqualifies Afro-Asian knowledge by presenting them as possessing a “furiously prelogical character” (Césaire, 1955, p. 50).
A comparable reverence also runs through Senghor’s poetry. In Chants d’ombre, Senghor writes of Mansa Musa’s pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324:
Ah! Hope sustains me that one day I shall run before
you, Princess, bearing your staff of office to the assembly
of nations.
It is a procession greater in grandeur than that of
Emperor Gongo Moussa himself on his journey toward
the dazzling East. (1964, p. 34)
This reference suggests the existence of precolonial global circulations within the Afro-Asian sphere, alluding to Mansa Musa’s pilgrimage routes linking West Africa to Egypt and Arabia. The poem thus provides further testimony to the existence of powerful civilizations in Africa and Asia that were already interacting long before the advent of European colonialism.
This revalorization of Afro-Asian civilizations is developed even further in Senghor’s essays collected in Liberté, tome I : Négritude et humanisme. There, Senghor contrasts African and Asian civilizations with Western civilization, arguing that Europe had not yet earned the designation of a “civilization” insofar as it remained incomplete and deprived of the “dormant energies” of Asia and Africa. In his view, it could not embody a genuine humanism because it denied participation in the universal to two-thirds of humanity—the Third World (Senghor, 1977). This echoes the opening of Césaire’s Discours sur le colonialisme (1955, p. 7), where he asserts that “A civilization that proves incapable of solving the problems created by its own functioning is a decadent civilization.” Senghor thus foregrounds the central role of Afro-Asian civilizations in world history at a time when Western hegemony continued to marginalize and infantilize non-Western societies. He traces, for example, the origins of Christianity—a major instrument of the colonial “civilizing mission” in Africa—by emphasizing that “Christianity is of Asian origin, an origin profoundly influenced by Saint Augustine the African” (Senghor, 1977, p. 75). Through this genealogical reinterpretation, Senghor destabilizes the ideological foundations of colonial discourse.
Mveng’s works in Cameroon likewise constitute a space for the revalorization of Afro-Asian knowledge and philosophies. This dynamic is particularly evident in Balafon, which opens with references to Confucian thought. The first three poems of the collection are grouped under the title “Lettres à mes amis” and are addressed respectively to Kong Fu Tseu, Roland Roger, and Moctezuma. In the first poem, “À Kong Fu Tseu,” Mveng expresses a fraternal reverence for Confucius while invoking imagery associated with Eastern religions through references to the Buddha and the pagoda, thereby acknowledging the existence of civilizations founded upon systems of belief distinct from those of the West (Galafa & Gonondo, 2025). Confucius, as a figure of the East, is addressed as a friend, highlighting a mutual Afro-Asian recognition of each other’s ways of life: “Kong-Fu-Tseu my friend, / You have thrown wide open for me / The gates of the Orient” (Mveng, 1972, p. 5). When Mveng subsequently declares “I am the granite Buddha” and “I am the pagoda” (p. 5), he constructs powerful images of Buddhism as a major spiritual institution of the East. This affirmation constitutes an explicit revalorization of Eastern religious traditions and stands in opposition to the privileged status accorded to Christianity by Western civilization. Through such poetic gestures, Mveng reinforces the broader Negritude project of restoring dignity to Afro-Asian civilizations and epistemologies long devalued by colonial discourse.
Conclusion
This examination of selected works by several writers seeks to highlight the deliberate and structurally embedded nature of Afro-Asian solidarities in Negritude literature. These solidarities may appear deliberate, yet they in fact stem from what we have described as a shared lived experience of Africa and Asia under Western (post)colonial domination. By tracing the sources of inspiration and the origins of Negritude from the 1920s through to the later works of the 1970s, we observe a sustained celebration of Afro-Asian identities, unified calls for anti-colonial resistance, and the revalorization of Afro-Asian civilizations and knowledge. Negritude’s committed literature was subsequently influenced by the activities of the Afro-Asian Writers’ Bureau in the aftermath of the 1955 Bandung Conference. From the Caribbean to Africa, the movement maintained a sustained intellectual and political momentum through themes that closely echoed the objectives of the Bureau. Ultimately, the aims and activities of Negritude extended beyond the mere reaffirmation of Black identity and culture to articulate a broader vision of Afro-Asian solidarity, shaped by the forms of cultural and literary collaboration institutionalized across the Global South through the Bureau.