Translated Solidarity

This essay traces the translation, reception, and adaptation of African anti-colonial poetics that emerged from the Congo Crisis in the People’s Republic of China in the early 1960s. It examines the Cold War mechanisms that coded translated African poetry, the socialist literary network that facilitated and constrained textual circulation, and the Maoist discourse of world revolution underlying Chinese writers’ responses to Patrice Lumumba’s assassination and African decolonization. The article argues that the Cold War served as a powerful geopolitical and discursive structure for keeping specific anti-colonial African authors, texts, tropes, and aesthetics alive and legible across national and ideological borders, while also rendering them susceptible to mistranslations and appropriations. The material, ideological, and affective configurations of the Cold War thus profoundly mediated imaginations and articulations of Sino-African solidarity in Maoist China.