Lotus was a trilingual political and cultural journal which existed between 1968 and 1991, published in Egypt, Lebanon, Tunisia and the German Democratic Republic. The magazine was established by the Afro-Asian Writers’ Association which emerged from the 1955 Bandung Conference, to support Afro-Asian solidarity and nonalignment. Lotus provided the means for cultural producers across anticolonial struggles to share knowledge, theorise, and build relations.

The Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures and the Department of International Development at Kings College London asked how inclusive pedagogy can be imagined differently through cultural production and anticolonial archives. As a starting point for their conversations, they focused on material produced by the writers and visual artists within Lotus.

The result is a toolkit, co-created with students, exploring how to productively use literary and artistic archives in the classroom to question past and ongoing colonial structures and racialised discrimination.

Using the journal gave students the experience of working with non-academic materials and formats, responding to them creatively and in different languages.

To find out more, visit the KCL website.