In the fall of 1966, Ḥiwār magazine published al-Ṭayyib Ṣāliḥ’s novel Mawsim al-hijrah ilā al-shamāl [ Season of Migration to the North ]. Arabic literary critics both hailed the novel in the Arabic press and mourned that it had been published by the Paris-based Congress for Cultural Freedom’s Ḥiwār, part of a global covert cultural front of the Cold War founded and funded by the CIA, maintaining an extensive list of high profile literary magazines, including not only the Beirut-based Arabic magazines Ḥiwār and briefly Adab , but also the London-based Encounter , Bombay’s Quest , and the African journals Black Orpheus in Ibadan and Transition in Kampala. A calculated response to the 1955 Bandung conference for Afro-Asian solidarity, the CIA’s domination of Afro-Asian literature would give way to the publication of the Afro-Asian Writers Association’s trilingual (Arabic/English/French) journal Afro-Asian Writings (later to be called Lotus), a broadly imagined legacy of the Bandung’s celebration of decolonization, various forms of communism and socialism, and resistance literature in the third world. Season of Migration to the North , oft read as a postcolonial novel, is better understood as a product of American Cold War cultural imperialism. As it reaches back intertextually to pre-Islamic poetry, the wine odes of ‘Abbasid poet Abū Nuwās, and the tales of A Thousand and One Nights in British translation, Ṣāliḥ’s novel exposes the long chain of empires subtending the dissemination of Arabic literature that left it vulnerable to becoming a terrain of cultural Cold War after Bandung’s call for Afro-Asian solidarity.