Local Circuits, Shared Imaginaries: An Interview with a Lotus Reader

How did a little magazine of Afro-Asian writings travel in the Global Cold War? The literary journal Lotus was a key element in the Afro-Asian Writers’ Association’s efforts to build bridges between the peoples of Africa and Asia, but comparatively little is known about its circulatory routes, individual readers, and reception in different contexts. Where did it go, and how was it received where it went? This interview with a former reader of Lotusseeks to offer some responses to these questions via one instance of its arrival in Mumbai, then Bombay, in the 1980s. It is suggestive of how this magazine and the political affinities it gathered might have circulated, generating local distribution networks and shared anticolonial imaginaries