SUMMARY:

In the 1950s and 1960s, the Soviet city of Tashkent emerged as a showcase of socialism for the Third World. Scores of visitors traveled to the city from decolonizing countries, encountering Soviet presentations of the city’s advanced modernity and authentic Asian culture. This article focuses on accounts of Tashkent produced by these visitors, suggesting they be understood as a coherent transnational discourse. Examining travelogues by Indian observers in the 1950s, as well as accounts of the Afro-Asian Writers Conference of 1958 and the Indo-Pakistani Peace Conference of 1966, it argues that Tashkent served as a site to engage with the project of the Third World, especially the problems of non-European modernity and postcolonial solidarity therein. Accounts of the city reflected both the hopes and tensions of Third Worldism in the Eurocentric world of the Cold War.