‘The New Life’: Mozambican Art Students in the USSR, and the Aesthetic Epistemologies of Anti-Colonial Solidarity

Abstract

This essay traces the histories and reverberations of the socialist scholarship programmes which brought art and graphic design students from Africa to the USSR during the 1980s. Drawing on the accounts and archives of art students and cultural workers who participated in or supported these programmes, it follows the path of one Mozambican cohort through a Graphic Design degree in Uzbekistan. It shows how, by navigating between the emancipatory opportunities offered by the programme, and the pedagogical expressions of state power that constrained it, the students developed affiliations and aesthetic positions which would survive, appropriate, and resist dominant geopolitical epistemologies. Ultimately, I argue that their artworks and recollections allow alternative, unofficial histories of Cold War solidarity networks to come into sharper focus.