Lines of Fire: Poetry of the Afro-Asian Writers' Movement

The SOAS Centre for Palestine Studies and Department of Politics and International Studies invites you to a book event and discussion of a new collection, Lines of Fire: Poetry of the Afro-Asian Writers' Movement (Daraja and American University of Beirut Press, 2025) recovering the lost arsenal of anti-colonial poetry. Join us for a presentation and discussion with editor Tariq Mehmood and Virinder Kalra.

Born in Tashkent, forged in clandestine presses, and echoing in today’s streets—this is the recovered front line of a global poetic resistance.

In 1958, at the Afro-Asian Writers’ Conference in Tashkent, a 90-year-old W.E.B. Du Bois stood before the decolonizing world and declared: “I am an American—I am an African.” It was a moment of radical, transnational self-definition.

From that conference emerged a literary movement and its journal, The Call—a direct line for poets from Algiers to Hanoi, Cairo to Beijing, to speak to one another, bypassing the languages and borders of their colonial masters. Though the movement later fractured under Cold War pressures, its two wings—The Call and the Soviet-backed Lotus—remained united in their stand against Zionism, racism, and empire.

Their poetry, often crafted under threat of torture, exile, and surveillance, became a clandestine weapon. Some of it was passed hand to hand, read aloud in underground meetings, and chanted at mass gatherings from Delhi to Ramallah, Cape Town to Gaza.

Now, for the first time, this vital corpus is restored. Lines of Fire, edited by Tariq Mehmood—former leading defendant in the landmark Bradford 12 case and now professor at the American University of Beirut—gathers these living weapons into a single, incendiary anthology. In an age of resurgent fascism and genocide, these voices speak with renewed, unyielding force: their anguish, rage, love, and hope are as urgent now as the day they were penned.

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If you wish to attend this event please register by following the link at the top of this page.

Main image: a cover of an issue of the Afro-Asian literary magazine The Call.