ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the Chinese contributions to the Afro-Asian Writers’ Bureau’s efforts to reinvent world literature from an anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist perspective. The Afro-Asian Writers’ Bureau was founded in the immediate postwar years with the objective of creating a counter-narrative to Eurocentric conceptions of world literature and universal culture. This counter-narrative was internationalist in its outlook and inspired by a Marxist understanding of worldliness. The AAWB was creating a world after its own image—a world that could stand in opposition to Eurocentric universality. The chapter shows how Chinese representatives to the AAWB, including Zhou Yang and Mao Dun, went from embracing a Soviet, socialist-realist model for world literature inspired by Maxim Gorky to sailing a progressively independent, nationalist course in the wake of the Sino-Soviet Split. The People’s Republic took over the AAWB in the 1960s as part of its increasingly aggressive agenda of cultural diplomacy in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The story of the AAWB is the story of the competing universals of the Cold War: the AAWB was trying to restage universality and world literature for a new postcolonial reality.
