Making a World after Empire: The Bandung Moment and Its Political Afterlives

By Christopher J. Lee and Vijay Prashad

In April 1955, twenty-nine countries from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East came together for a diplomatic conference in Bandung, Indonesia, intending to define the direction of the postcolonial world. Ostensibly representing two-thirds of the world’s population, the Bandung conference occurred during a key moment of transition in the mid-twentieth century—amid the global wave of decolonization that took place after the Second World War and the nascent establishment of a new Cold War world order in its wake. Participants such as Jawaharlal Nehru of India, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, Zhou Enlai of China, and Sukarno of Indonesia seized this occasion to attempt the creation of a political alternative to the dual threats of Western neocolonialism and the Cold War interventionism of the United States and the Soviet Union.

The essays collected here explore the diverse repercussions of this event, tracing diplomatic, intellectual, and sociocultural histories that ensued as well as addressing the broader intersection of postcolonial and Cold War history. With a new foreword by Vijay Prashad and a new preface by the editor, Making a World after Empire speaks to contemporary discussions of decolonization, Third Worldism, and the emergence of the Global South, thus reestablishing the conference’s importance in twentieth-century global history.

Contributors: Michael Adas, Laura Bier, James R. Brennan, G. Thomas Burgess, Antoinette Burton, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Julian Go, Christopher J. Lee, Jamie Monson, Jeremy Prestholdt, and Denis M. Tull.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Release date: Aug 19, 2019
• ISBN: 9780896805057

Vijay Prashad

Vijay Prashad is the Executive Director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is the author and editor of several books, including The Darker Nations: A Biography of the Short-Lived Third World (The New Press) and The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South (Verso). He writes regularly for Frontline, The Hindu, Alternet and BirGun. He is Chief Editor at LeftWord Books.

Book preview

Praise for Making a World after Empire

This important collection of essays points to a phenomenon that has been lost in the common assumption of a worldwide movement from colonial empires to nation-states: the richer imagination of people in those empires and their quest for alternative modes of political connection.

—Frederick Cooper, author of Citizenship, Inequality, and Difference: Historical Perspectives

This book is an important springboard in providing a critical genealogy of the transformative potential, but also aporia, inherent in the older ‘third world’ and contemporary ‘global South.’

—Journal of Global History

The book is a welcome addition to the literature on the Bandung Conference.

—Comparativ

This is a very readable and useful collection of essays shaped around the ideals and challenges that formed the ‘Bandung Spirit.’ … It should be of greatest interest to collections of developmental politics, the modern Global South, international relations, post-colonial studies, and modern Asian and African studies.

—Canadian Journal of History

The Bandung Conference, when it is recalled at all, is usually both romanticized and misremembered. This splendid collection returns us to the historical record with a combination of empirical and conceptual essays that speak to the meaning of Bandung at the time and thereafter. It is transnational, postcolonial, and, even more important, exciting history that speaks to our complex political present. Christopher Lee has edited an essential volume for anyone interested in the world in the wake of World War II.

—Marilyn B. Young, author of Iraq and the Lessons of Vietnam

"Making a World after Empire is an innovative and challenging collection of essays that investigates the political and cultural intersections of Africa and Asia in the second half of the twentieth century. These varied case studies in the emerging field of postcolonial Afro-Asianism—some empirical, others conceptual—open fresh ways of thinking about relationships across the Indian Ocean and beyond. Taking the 1955 Bandung Conference as their point of entry, the pathbreaking studies presented probe an exciting era of multinodal political connections. They will stimulate new debate and writing about the postcolonial world, the Indian Ocean region, and Afro-Asian relations for some time to come."

—Pier M. Larson, Professor of African and Indian Ocean History, Johns Hopkins University

Making a World after Empire

This series of publications on Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Global and Comparative Studies is designed to present significant research, translation, and opinion to area specialists and to a wide community of persons interested in world affairs. The editor seeks manuscripts of quality on any subject and can usually make a decision regarding publication within three months of receipt of the original work. Production methods generally permit a work to appear within one year of acceptance. The editor works closely with authors to produce a high-quality book. The series appears in a paperback format and is distributed worldwide. For more information, contact the executive editor at Ohio University Press, 19 Circle Drive, The Ridges, Athens, Ohio 45701.

Executive editor: Gillian Berchowitz

AREA CONSULTANTS

Africa: Diane M. Ciekawy

Latin America: Brad Jokisch, Patrick Barr-Melej, and Rafael Obregon

Southeast Asia: William H. Frederick

The Ohio University Research in International Studies series is published for the Center for International Studies by Ohio University Press. The views expressed in individual volumes are those of the authors and should not be considered to represent the policies or beliefs of the Center for International Studies, Ohio University Press, or Ohio University.

Making a World after Empire

THE BANDUNG MOMENT AND ITS POLITICAL AFTERLIVES

Second edition

Edited by

Christopher J. Lee

With a new foreword by Vijay Prashad and a new preface by the editor

Ohio University Research in International Studies

Global and Comparative Studies Series No. 20

Ohio University Press

© 2010, 2019 by the Center for International Studies, Ohio University

www.ohioswallow.com

All rights reserved

To obtain permission to quote, reprint, or otherwise reproduce or distribute material from Ohio University Press publications, please contact our rights and permissions department at [phone] or [phone] (fax).

Front cover images: Jawaharlal Nehru of India and Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt (top photo) and Zhou Enlai of China (bottom photo) walking to the conference hall in Bandung, Indonesia, April 1955. Reprinted courtesy of the Museum of the Asian-African Conference.

Some of the chapters published in this book have appeared elsewhere and are reprinted with permission:

Dipesh Chakrabarty, The Legacies of Bandung: Decolonization and the Politics of Culture, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 40, No. 46, 12 November 2005.

Michael Adas, Contested Hegemony: The Great War and the Afro-Asian Assault on the Civilizing Mission Ideology, Journal of World History, Vol. 15, No. 1 (2004): 31–63.

Denis M. Tull, China’s Engagement in Africa: Scope, Significance and Consequences, Journal of Modern African Studies, Vol. 44, No. 3 (2006): 459–479.

Second edition, expanded and updated, published 2019

Paperback ISBN 978-0-89680-322-0

Electronic ISBN 978-0-89680-505-7

Printed in the United States of America

The books in the Ohio University Research in International Studies Series are printed on acid-free paper. ™

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lee, Christopher J.

Making a world after empire : the Bandung moment and its political afterlives / Christopher J. Lee.

p. cm.—(Ohio University research in international studies. Global and comparative studies series ; no 11)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-89680-277-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-89680-468-5 (electronic) 1. Asian-African Conference (1st : 1955 : Bandung, Indonesia) 2. Asian-African Conference (1st : 1955 : Bandung, Indonesia)—Influence. 3. Afro-Asian politics. 4. Asia—Relations—Africa. 5. Africa—Relations—Asia. 6. Imperialism—History—20th century. 7. Decolonization—Asia—History—20th century. 8. Decolonization—Africa—History—20th century. I. Title.

DS35.2.L44 2010

327.1'16—dc22 2009053610

Contents

List of Illustrations

Foreword

Vijay Prashad

Preface to the Second Edition

Christopher J. Lee

Acknowledgments

Contributors

INTRODUCTION

Between a Moment and an Era

The Origins and Afterlives of Bandung

Christopher J. Lee

PART ONE

Framings

Concepts, Politics, History

CHAPTER 1

The Legacies of Bandung

Decolonization and the Politics of Culture

Dipesh Chakrabarty

CHAPTER 2

Contested Hegemony

The Great War and the Afro-Asian Assault on the Civilizing Mission

Michael Adas

CHAPTER 3

Modeling States and Sovereignty

Postcolonial Constitutions in Asia and Africa

Julian Go

PART TWO

Alignments and Nonalignments

Movements, Projects, Outcomes

CHAPTER 4

Feminism, Solidarity, and Identity in the Age of Bandung

Third World Women in the Egyptian Women’s Press

Laura Bier

CHAPTER 5

Radio Cairo and the Decolonization of East Africa, 1953–64

James R. Brennan

CHAPTER 6

Mao in Zanzibar

Nationalism, Discipline, and the (De)Construction of Afro-Asian Solidarities

G. Thomas Burgess

CHAPTER 7

Working Ahead of Time

Labor and Modernization during the Construction of the TAZARA Railway, 1968–86

Jamie Monson

CHAPTER 8

Tricontinentalism in Question

The Cold War Politics of Alex La Guma and the African National Congress

Christopher J. Lee

PART THREE

The Present

Predicaments, Practices, Speculation

CHAPTER 9

China’s Engagement with Africa

Scope, Significance, and Consequences

Denis M. Tull

CHAPTER 10

Superpower Osama

Symbolic Discourse in the Indian Ocean Region after the Cold War

Jeremy Prestholdt

EPILOGUE

The Sodalities of Bandung

Toward a Critical 21st-Century History

Antoinette Burton

Select Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

INTRODUCTION

Introd.1. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru of India and President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt arrive in Bandung

Introd.2. Local popular reception of the arrival of international delegations in Bandung

Introd.3. Premier Zhou Enlai of China with Prime Minister Ali Sastroamidjojo of Indonesia at the Bandung Airport

Introd.4. Premier Zhou Enlai, who was also China’s foreign minister, delivering his address at the Bandung Conference

Introd.5. The Liberian delegation in attendance

Introd.6. Members of the Gold Coast (Ghana) and Indian delegations during a recess

CHAPTER 6

6.1. Bruce Lee stamps, Tanzania

CHAPTER 7

7.1. Learning surveying techniques on the job

7.2. Presidents Kaunda and Nyerere inspecting a tunnel at Kisarawe Village with leaders Jin Hui and Pu Ke, October 1, 1970

7.3. Placing the concrete sleepers onto the railbed

CHAPTER 8

8.1. Passport of Alex La Guma, courtesy of the Mayibuye Centre, University of the Western Cape

8.2. Passport of Alex La Guma, courtesy of Mayibuye Centre, University of the Western Cape

8.3. Detail of personal map, courtesy of Mayibuye Centre, University of the Western Cape

8.4. Detail of personal map with attention to travels in the Soviet Union, courtesy of Mayibuye Centre, University of the Western Cape

CHAPTER 10

10.1. Osama Bin Laden T-Shirt, 2008. Photograph by the author

10.2. Tupac Shakur on a matatu, 2005. Photograph by the author

10.3. Osama graffiti, 2005. Photograph by the author

Foreword

Bandung Dreams

Vijay Prashad

BANDUNG IS NO longer only the name of a city. It is the name of a set of dreams. It refers to the Asian-African Conference of 1955, where a number of newly independent states formulated the start of a common agenda against imperialism. But it refers to more than that. There were other conferences held in other cities—Colombo, Tashkent, Cairo. But the names of these other towns did not become a talisman, a word that referred to a grand dream, a desire for freedom.

It was obvious to those who came to Bandung that they should not anticipate an easy future.¹ Colonialism was not defeated cheaply. The imperialist powers stubbornly held onto a hope that they might retain their colonies. Due north from Bandung, the British conducted a brutal counterinsurgency war against the people of Malaysia, a war that lasted until 1960. This war mirrored the violence of the British in Kenya and in Rhodesia. Portugal would not allow its colonies any degree of freedom. Nor would France, who were defeated in Vietnam in 1954, but who began a terrible war in Algeria to try—unsuccessfully—to defeat Algeria’s National Liberation Front. The United States hastily took up the French mantle in Vietnam. It sent in its covert forces to overthrow the democratically elected governments in Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954). It was in 1955 that Aimé Césaire republished his Discourse on Colonialism, in which he wrote, I make no secret of my opinion that at the present time the barbarism of Western Europe has reached an incredibly high level, being only surpassed—far surpassed, it is true—by the barbarism of the United States.²

Césaire wrote not of the past, but of the present time. When the leaders of the fragile new states met in Bandung, they faced immense challenges from the imperialist powers. This is a fact that has not been recognized in the literature of the postcolonial world. The very suggestion of the prefix post is erroneous. Something did change with the independence of the new states, with the creation of the Third World Project, but much did not change.³ New beginnings seemed possible, but the dreary continuation of the past seemed equally plausible. Bandung, in many ways, was an anticipation of something rather than a celebration of anything. It was always a hope.

It was a hope the imperialists needed to suffocate. The tale of Ghana is apposite. Kwame Nkrumah, then fighting to win independence from Britain for the Gold Coast, did not go to Indonesia (although he sent his close comrade Kojo Botsio in his place). Nkrumah did go to Belgrade in 1961 for the founding conference of the Non-Alignment Movement (NAM). The NAM met just after the Congo’s shining light, Patrice Lumumba, had been assassinated. This murder weighed heavily on Nkrumah, who told the leaders from Africa, Asia, and Latin America that colonialism had to end—not that it had ended, but that it had to end. Nkrumah would often point out how the West liked to suggest that, with the end of the slave trade and of direct colonial control of Africa, a page had been turned. But this was untrue—when African countries tried to chart an independent path, they were blocked. The assassination of Lumumba was one example. The coup against Nkrumah’s government in 1966 was another. Nkrumah had already written Neocolonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism in 1965. He could feel the breath of imperialism on his neck. Africa, and indeed most of the darker nations, would not be given a chance. They were out of time.

Not one component of the Third World Project—not its social or cultural claims, nor its economic agenda—would be welcomed by the imperialist powers. The cultural gatherings and their periodicals, with Lotus at the heart, would not grow into the producers of a new vision of world history and human culture. Unable to pivot into the expensive world of television and film, the cultural formations of the Third World slowly withered (and they were directly combatted in our countries by CIA-funded cultural projects). Economic ideas of development and trade that culminated in the 1974 UN Resolution on the New International Economic Order (NIEO) came under attack from the imperialist intellectuals and institutions. The Group of Seven (G7), formed in 1973, directly confronted the NIEO and sought to break the political authority of the Third World bloc. By the early 1980s, as a consequence of the harsh debt crisis and of the political maneuvers to destroy it, the Third World Project was snuffed out.

THIS IS THE context of Bandung: how we look back at it and how we understand its afterlives. There is the nostalgic glance, surely, but less for what Bandung was than for what it could have been and what it continues to suggest. Not a year has gone by since the collapse of the Bandung agenda that there has not been a call for a New Bandung, from multilateral agencies as much as from people’s movements. In 2013, in its flagship Human Development Report (entitled The Rise of the South: Human Progress in a Diverse World), the UN Development Programme called for the establishment of a new South Commission to bring a fresh vision of how the South’s diversity can be a force for solidarity.⁴ The creation of the World Social Forum, and now the International Assemblies, is a movement from below to revive the dynamic of Bandung and deepen it.

The present is intolerable. There must be something better than this. That is the call of Bandung, the Bandung Spirit—the stance that says that the people of Africa, Asia, and Latin America are not servants of the world order but citizens of it. They want to help shape it. They want to live in it. They want to breathe.

Notes

1. For excellent assessments of Bandung itself, see Wildan Sena Utama, Vision for the Future: The Intellectual History of the 1955 Bandung Conference (New Delhi: LeftWord Books, 2019) and Yutaka Yoshida, Bandung as an Unfinished Project of Decolonisation, chapter 4 of Colonialism, Gender, and Representation of the Masses (PhD diss., Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo, 2013).

2. Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000 [1955]), 47.

3. The idea of the Third World Project grounds my two-volume history, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (2007) and The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South (2012).

4. United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report 2013: The Rise of the South: Human Progress in a Diverse World (New York: United Nations Development Programme, 2013), 8.

Preface to the Second Edition

Return of the Event

Bandung and the Concept of the Conference

This dancer defies fatigue . . .

—Keorapetse Kgositsile, Bandung Dance (1971)

THE PASSAGE OF nine years since the publication of the first edition of this book has provided time to reflect on past thoughts and positions. This project had multiple personal origins, beginning with a seminar by Barbara Harlow; a request from a colleague in Portugal that I look up an essay in the journal Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings (then unknown to me); and conversations with philosopher David Kim at Harvard in 2003 and 2004, which led to our co-hosting of a workshop on Bandung at the Stanford Humanities Center in 2005. The intellectual origins of this book can be located further afield, in scholarship and debates during the 1990s. Much attention then was drawn to circuits of knowledge between metropoles and colonies as examined by Nicholas Dirks, Ann Laura Stoler, and Frederick Cooper. Subaltern studies had stirred an inspiring discussion about the possibilities and limits of social history, while postcolonial studies appeared to have reached an impasse, as contended by Arif Dirlik and others. In contrast, postcolonial history, at least in my home field of African history, awaited more comprehensive examination as argued by Stephen Ellis—a status quo that has radically changed over the past decade. Not least, with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the decline of the area studies paradigm—a Cold War humanism—seemed foreseeable, with transnationalism and globalization, as promoted by Arjun Appadurai and others, reshaping academic rhetoric and research agendas of the time.¹

The 1955 Asian-African Conference provided a unique vista and a possible solution for thinking through these trends and their respective challenges. It supplied a point of orientation for grounding transnational histories, adding greater empiricism to postcolonial studies, and demonstrating the lateral, interconnected experiences of decolonization between continents, thus defying a Euro-American mapping of the world. It also opened a more complicated set of political questions inflected by the Cold War—the age of formal empires was over, but emergent conditions of neocolonialism and suzerainty continued. In retrospect, in a way that I could not completely grasp at the time, Making a World after Empire formed part of a broader historiographical turn away from imperial connections to postcolonial South-South connections. In doing so, it marked the limits of preceding work. The domination-resistance paradigm as articulated and popularized by Ranajit Guha and James Scott did not readily apply; nor did anticolonial liberation models of writing history, in the national style of Terence Ranger, offer remedy, as important as these interventions still are. Both frameworks were too local in scope. New understandings and approaches to power were needed to confront and accommodate an empirical landscape being imagined and defined by activists and intellectuals between continents. Yet, in the most traditional way imaginable, the Bandung meeting provided an event to anchor these diverse issues. The title of this preface draws from an essay by Pierre Nora first published in 1974, in which he offers a counterpoint to the Annales School and its longue durée methodology, based on the protests and spectacle of May 1968.² Though everyday practices over long periods give shape to communal forms of life, events still matter—rupturing the present from the past while creating new spaces for once unthinkable futures.

International conferences in particular are good to think with, to use an expression of Claude Lévi-Strauss. As events, they hold the potential to step outside national storylines and cast light on contingent political communities unhindered by blood and soil. The case of Bandung is instructive in this regard. An initial lesson to be drawn is that the Bandung meeting defies simplistic narration. It is, prima facie, a diplomatic occasion, as closely analyzed by Amitav Acharya, See Seng Tan, and Kweku Ampiah. However, it has also been interpreted as a turning point for human rights discourse and international law, an opportunity for modernization and international development, a nadir in the global history of political Islam, and an opening for a new epistemology of postcolonial knowledge and history.³ This book shares these parallel concerns for treating Bandung as an irreducible event that convened a variety of themes and histories.

The political multitude that met in April 1955 pursued a number of concurrent and competing interests: not all twenty-nine countries that participated were independent, not all had experienced colonialism as such, and many had preexisting relations with Cold War powers. An assortment of unofficial observers were also present, Richard Wright being the best known of a group that included African American congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and South African Communist Party leader Moses Kotane—each of whom viewed the conference in historic terms, despite their unsanctioned status.⁴ From a geopolitical standpoint, the Bandung meeting was a vital national moment for Sukarno and Indonesia, but it was also a political catalyst for the region of Southeast Asia. It served as a provisional response to the 1954 Geneva Conference that, with elements of Cold War condescension, sought to resolve conflicts in Southeast Asia and the Korean peninsula from the distant vantage point of Europe.⁵ In a topographic sense, Bandung can thus be approached concentrically, framed in local, regional, and intercontinental ways. Though the meeting tilted toward Asia in terms of the countries in attendance, the geographic destination of Afro-Asianism as a diplomatic movement, makeshift ideology, and set of transnational relationships was decidedly Africa, a trend that has continued in a rise-fall-rise fashion to the present. Africa’s engagement with China since 2000 has arguably been the most significant development for the continent thus far in the twenty-first century.

These complex intentions and outcomes have nonetheless been streamlined, censored, and at times forgotten. A second lesson of Bandung is therefore the epistemic challenge it poses: Bandung as pedagogy. The Asian-African Conference has constituted something of a litmus test, apt to being well-known or unknown, celebrated or rejected. It demonstrates the tidal nature of history, with its meaning waxing and waning depending on political mood and the intellectual climate. As a result, Bandung has taught us what the boundaries of academic disciplines, area studies, and their politics are. The nonconformity of Bandung and its sui generis nature have frequently rendered it subject to two kinds of treatment: either offhand dismissal or Third World folklore. Taking the former position risks disregarding the innovative agency and motivations of postcolonial states and, more broadly, ignoring the importance of diplomatic history beyond the Euro-American context, thus tacitly legitimating a Western political condescension toward other parts of the world. Stated differently, underestimating the Bandung conference—and by extension conferences held later in Cairo, Accra, Havana, and elsewhere—can sustain a provincial Eurocentric view of the Cold War, which Odd Arne Westad and Vijay Prashad, among others, have compellingly worked against.⁶

On the other hand, Robert Vitalis has cautioned about the hazards of mythologizing the Asian-African Conference, going so far as to argue that the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) founded in 1961 in Belgrade was not so much a successor of Bandung, the way it is typically perceived, as it was its competitor.⁷ Vitalis’s argument complements an earlier position taken by Itty Abraham to separate the racial character of Bandung from the strategic diplomacy of the NAM.⁸ Lorenz Lüthi has similarly contended that Afro-Asianism and the NAM have too often been confused and taken as synonymous, as have the terms neutralism and nonalignment.⁹ These points are important. On balance, this book is less concerned with tracking nonalignment as a diplomatic approach than it is with historicizing Afro-Asianism as a phenomenon. As indicated in the title and chapters of part 2, alignment and nonalignment could be dynamic terms on the ground. Furthermore, nonalignment was not a consensual aim or outcome at Bandung, as noted in this book’s original introduction, and Lüthi’s chronology of the decline of Afro-Asianism conforms to what is argued there. To reference another source, Ali Mazrui has quoted Léopold Senghor as remarking in 1965, "For my part, I think Afro-Asianism has been superseded, for this form of solidarity should be extended to Latin America and to tiers monde in general."¹⁰

However, the matter of mythology—beyond unintended factual errors made by scholars—raises more difficult, yet fascinating, questions, beyond issues of terminology. Vitalis does not go far enough in asking about the uses of political mythology in this instance, nor does he fully consider how participants at Bandung and after had a stake in promoting the conference’s ethos—better known as the Bandung Spirit.¹¹ Many of these promoters were not misinformed messengers but willful agents invested in a specific political vision.¹² Mythology is nothing new to modern politics as evidenced by nationalism, but it is unusual for a one-time multinational event—a status that has nonetheless enabled the political appropriation of the meeting and left it vulnerable to factual inaccuracy. The mythos of Bandung began swiftly.

To offer a draft genealogy for the purpose of illustration, Richard Wright’s well-known account The Color Curtain (1956) was published only a year after the conference, and it remains the most influential perspective on the meeting. But the symbol of Bandung quickly traveled beyond firsthand participants. In his report on the first Congress of Black Writers and Artists held in September 1956, James Baldwin wrote that Alioune Diop, editor of Présence africaine, referred to the Paris meeting as a second Bandung and that Léopold Senghor invoked the spirit of Bandung as a source for inspiring a black cultural renaissance.¹³ Frantz Fanon argued in a November 1958 essay for El Moudjahid, a periodical of the anticolonial Front de libération nationale (FLN) of Algeria, that the Bandung pact—akin to the Warsaw Pact—marked the historic commitment of the oppressed to help one another and to impose a definitive setback upon the forces of exploitation.¹⁴ In his wide-ranging Message to the Grass Roots speech delivered in Detroit in November 1963, Malcolm X named the Bandung conference as an occasion when Asian and African nations came together against their common enemy: the white man.¹⁵ X incorrectly cited 1954 as the year of the meeting, but his engagement with the Third World continued, evolving from a Black Asiatic identity he embraced through the Nation of Islam.¹⁶ Oliver Tambo, president of the exiled African National Congress (ANC), later summoned Bandung and Afro-Asian solidarity at an international conference in support of liberation movements held in Lusaka, Zambia, in April 1979.¹⁷ During the 1980s, an ANC delegation similarly referenced Bandung in a statement delivered at the Afro-Arab Solidarity Conference held in Luanda, Angola, in December 1981. And, finally, the South African writer, Alex La Guma, in his capacity as secretary general of the Afro-Asian Writers Association, originated this cultural organization with Bandung in a 1983 speech delivered in Tashkent, Soviet Uzbekistan, marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Association’s founding.¹⁸

These assorted examples from the mid-1950s up to the 1980s demonstrate a politics of citation and a recurrence of meaning that sustained the idea of Afro-Asianism and the iconic importance of Bandung for decades. If Afro-Asianism declined at the diplomatic level by the mid-1960s, it continued to be reinvented in different ways at the popular level. Its longevity recalls George Shepperson’s long-ago assessment of pan-Africanism as a group of movements, many very ephemeral in which the cultural element often predominates.¹⁹ The uses and endurance of Bandung subsequently point to a third lesson—Bandung as method. While it is essential for scholars to differentiate Afro-Asianism, nonalignment, and the Third World, it is also important to understand how these terms and the ideologies behind them creatively converged at the grassroots level. They informed and constituted one another in organic, unexpected ways.²⁰ A subsequent problem with this terminology and interpreting Bandung, as with many studies of nationalism and diplomatic history, is that elites can take center stage. To argue that the NAM and Afro-Asianism were rivals may be correct in light of Sino-Indian tensions and the failure of the Panchsheel Treaty (1954), the divergent ambitions of Jawaharlal Nehru of India and Zhou Enlai of the People’s Republic of China, and the emergent roles of Yugoslav president Josip Broz Tito and Ghanaian president Kwame Nkrumah. But such an argument can also overlook the perspectives of second-tier countries involved in both communities. The NAM is a competitor to Bandung or Afro-Asianism more generally only if certain elite views are addressed.²¹ Similarly, the task of tracing the origins of nonalignment is indispensable, but such a pursuit should also accommodate the term’s fluid qualities and its diverse itineraries on the ground. The anticolonial roots of nonalignment, its casual intermittent use versus its committed public promotion, as well as the contributions of supporting figures, like Indian diplomat and Nehru confidant V. K. Krishna Menon, should all be taken seriously.²²

Decentering Nehru and other leaders is not simply a matter of bringing complexity and a sense of scale to the shifting meanings of these ideas. This tactic is also about politics. In employing Bandung as method, these hierarchies should be accounted for and resisted in order to allow for both academic accuracy and the popular uses of these ideas to be revealed. These latter practices were less strictly fastidious, yet as a result they unlocked the evolutionary potential of these worldviews, as briefly sketched earlier. In this spirit, Afro-Asianism in the purview of political scientist Locksley Edmondson did not so much decline as experience a transformation. In his words, the apparent failure of Afro-Asianism to survive as a movement was in effect a function of its success in serving as the critical catalyst and foundation for a wider Third-World coalition.²³ Underscoring the import of popular perspectives, Ali Mazrui has taken this approach further to write, The whole concept of the Third World perhaps signified the emergence of a new form of populism—global populism.²⁴

The notion of Bandung as method has surfaced in different ways since the original publication of this book through concepts of Bandung modernism and Bandung humanism—intellectual projects that have revisited the cosmopolitan conviviality of the conference and the principles charted in the Dasa Sila Bandung to rethink rights, aesthetics, and epistemologies of the postcolonial period.²⁵ In these metonymic ways, Bandung has become a concept-metaphor—an intersectional moment of history and symbolic capital that has come to represent and do the work of emplotting a universal history of the Global South. In a like-minded gesture, I am tempted to call for a Bandung historicism here, one that circumvents the conformities and hagiographies of insular nation-state narratives and instead cultivates an intercontinental sensibility that accounts for layered histories of connection and exchange, the role of intermediaries in testing and defining new and unstable political concepts, as well as the unruliness of Cold War internationalisms and the tensions of postcoloniality, as noted in this book’s original introduction. Its final paragraphs essentially call for such an approach.

If I hesitate in promoting this notion further, it is out of regard for the political magnitude of the Third World and its successor, the Global South, with cities such as Algiers, Cairo, Delhi, and Havana also serving as historic sites, as well as those that have received less attention but still fostered cultures of tricontinentalism, including Accra, Beirut, Dar es Salaam, Kingston, Luanda, and Tashkent.²⁶ These dispersed locales must be understood as interconnected; Fanon once referred to the Bandung-Accra axis that united Asian and African countries.²⁷ Indeed, the urbanism of this geography might also be critiqued. Nonetheless, these metropolitan hubs reveal other Afro-Asianisms that crisscrossed not only the Indian Ocean world, but the Black Atlantic, the Middle East, and Soviet Central Asia—the last a region of surprising Cold War internationalism almost entirely forgotten today.²⁸ The Third World and its inheritor must be understood as noncontiguous, an archipelago of identities and interests, like Indonesia itself. The Global South as a political space and configuration does not conform to any normative geography, hence its powerful capacity for reimagining alternative histories and different aspirational futures. The shape of the Global South recalls Sukarno’s emphasis on his country’s motto Unity in Diversity (Bhinneka Tunggal Ika) in his opening address in 1955. Sisters and Brothers, Indonesia is Asia-Africa in small, he remarked.²⁹

This tension between highlighting the significance of Bandung and also seeking to avoid its overdetermination is captured in the title of this book’s introduction, Between a Moment and an Era. Rather than signaling ambivalence or uncertainty, this title’s suggestion of liminality and becoming—that Bandung could both constitute a singular event and augur a coming historical period—intended to capture the temporal and political vicissitudes of the conference and its diverse aftermaths. In approaching both its limits and its potential, the introduction sought to avoid the false imperative of historical judgment described earlier and instead allow a variety of meanings to emerge. To offer an analogy, one could argue that the series of Pan-African Congresses—started deliberately at the same time as the Versailles Peace Conference in Paris in 1919—repeatedly failed to achieve their aim of black self-determination and the end of colonial rule in Africa. But the Fifth Pan-African Congress of 1945, held in Manchester and organized by George Padmore and Kwame Nkrumah, did mark a turning point that eventually led to the pivotal moment of Ghana’s independence in 1957, despite limitations in the short term. Accommodation must be made for both the immediacy of the event and its longer-term destinies.

Taking this analogy further, international conferences can provide a means of assembling alternative chronologies of world history, as noted in the first edition of this book. Whether initiated by intellectuals, as at the Pan-African Congresses, or organized by statesmen, as at Bandung, such meetings were not simply an effect of political conditions like colonialism or decolonization. They could also generate change—both diplomatic and discursive, radical and regressive. Beyond the problem of elitism and its potential for conservatism along class, gender, and nativist lines, conferences could foster and project new registers of thought and imagination, beyond interstate politics. Gatherings like the First Universal Races Congress (URC) in London in 1911 foregrounded intellectual questions and academic ambitions, with figures like W. E. B. Du Bois—a perennial habitué of the twentieth-century conference circuit, who served as the honorary secretary for the United States at the URC—finding renewed focus for the global parameters of race, despite the imperial underpinnings and mix of amity and enmity that characterized the convention.³⁰ His novel Dark Princess (1928), with its interracial romance between an African American man and an Indian princess, has been interpreted as a reflection of this conference experience.³¹ A lesser-known attendee, Dusé Mohamed Ali, an actor and journalist from Egypt, launched in 1912 the African Times and Orient Review, a pioneering pan-African and pan-Asian periodical, also in the wake of the meeting.³² These two examples point to the formations of new humanisms that such occasions could initiate.

Conferences can consequently serve as a foundation for the writing of world history. Unlike the paradigm of world-systems analysis pursued by Immanuel Wallerstein or models of exchange elaborated by Alfred Crosby and Jerry Bentley, international conferences are not about global connections that are observable only in the longue durée from a removed, scholarly vantage point. Rather, international meetings themselves can display a global consciousness—a direct awareness of the world situation at a particular moment in time. This dimension has been highlighted in Jocelyn Olcott’s recent history of the 1975 World Conference on Women held in Mexico City, which, through its aim of promoting a global feminism, was billed as the greatest consciousness-raising event in history.³³ This politics of recognition was not isolated. As cited earlier, utilizing conferences as a component for writing world histories should not necessarily depend on the immediate consequences of single meetings, but nor should larger meaning rely on the episodic routine of events over time. Indeed, the main promise of this approach is that it can disrupt the conformities of teleological narration defined by the nation-state. Familiar types of historical causality—war, class conflict, territorial conquest and irredentism, and political independence, among others—that tend to organize history in linear, unidirectional ways are temporarily marginalized in favor of intersectional convergence and multilateral outcomes.

Above all, conferences allow new and different assemblages of political community to take shape on the global stage. In the original introduction I used the term communitas to capture the ritual nature of international membership and community building after independence, with summitry as one practice that reinforced sovereignty while permitting broader alliances to be established. Such alliances could be built on feeling and sentiment—what Leela Gandhi elsewhere has called affective communities—as well as on diplomatic pragmatism.³⁴ They could remain porous and flexible, positioned within and between continents, and attentive to local, national, and international concerns. Summits could also enable intergenerational dialogue and exchange—Gamal Nasser was only thirty-seven years old at Bandung, whereas Nehru, who had attended the famed 1927 League against Imperialism meeting in Brussels, was sixty-five, granting him a seniority and expertise that the younger leader could profit from. The proliferation of international diplomacy and transnational communities after the Second World War suggests the continued power of empire-like networks under a different set of flags. But such communities and networks also insist on a reperiodization of Cold War timelines, emphasizing chronologies of dissent against past and present forms of global influence.³⁵

Against this backdrop, the Bandung meeting can be approached as part of a collection of postwar Asian summits including the Asian Relations Conference in New Delhi (1947), the Asia and Pacific Rim Peace Conference in Beijing (1952), and the Asian Socialist Conferences in Rangoon (1953) and Bombay (1956). Though not embracing nonalignment as such, Bandung can still form part of the diplomatic lead-up to the 1961 founding of the NAM in Belgrade, including the 1956 meeting between Nehru, Nasser, and Tito in Brioni, Yugoslavia. Bandung can also be grouped within a series of conferences that promoted different versions of Third Worldism, such as the 1958 Afro-Asian Writers Conference in Tashkent, the 1961 Afro-Asian Women’s Conference in Cairo, the 1966 Tricontinental Conference in Havana, and the All-African People’s Conferences in Accra (1958), Tunis (1960), and Cairo (1961). Not least, Bandung can be associated with various political attempts during the 1950s to engage with matters of multiracialism, multiculturalism, and political inclusion after the Holocaust, the beginning of apartheid in South Africa in 1948, and the violence and diplomacy that characterized Cold War decolonization—a compressed sequence of global events that variously informed UNESCO’s postwar efforts against racism, the 1955 Congress of the People in Kliptown (Soweto), and the 1956 Soummam Conference in Algeria, respectively. These latter moments possess key distinctions, but they also shared a common agenda of confronting discrimination and attempting to think beyond colonial identities through the new opportunities of citizenship presented in a world experiencing a radical makeover. Bandung and its peers constitute a counterpoint to the Berlin Conference (1884–85) that infamously resulted in the final colonization of Africa. By similar analogy, these assorted diplomatic meetings—at times tightly networked, at times expressions of indirect causal influence—echoed earlier European antecedents such as the Concert of Europe, established in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, and the League of Nations, founded in the aftermath of the First World War—both comprising institutional bids for lasting international peace.³⁶

This comparison across two centuries is not meant to impute a moral equivalence. Rather, the Bandung conference and other Third World summits underscore the expansive political geography of nation-states that quickly emerged after the Second World War and their newfound role in shaping global politics. Unlike their predecessors that consolidated imperial interests, these postcolonial meetings cultivated a politics of reciprocity necessitated by continued imbalances of economic strength and political power after decolonization. Such dialogical relationships, to use a concept of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s in this volume, collected political, economic, and social capital that gained expression in the United Nations and other venues. Contra popular perceptions of independence and sovereignty, postcolonial summitry alludes to the inadequacies of the nation-state model, despite its ubiquity, and the limitations of the modern citizenship it had to offer.

These diplomatic interactions were regularly tested at the local level along lines of race, gender, class, ideology, and nation, as demonstrated throughout the contributions in this book. The Third World Project, as described by Vijay Prashad, in fact consisted of multiple projects, compelling the collaborative research approach here that accounts for friction as well as conviviality, disagreement as well as friendship.³⁷ In putting these chapters together originally, the intention was not to achieve conformity but to identify diverse situations, unaddressed themes, misplaced connections, and forgotten intermediaries that inhabited archival seams between nations and continents. It naturally follows that, in terms of genre, these chapters complicate the edges between state and nonstate actors, as well as the boundaries between diplomatic and sociocultural histories. A number of these case studies examine unofficial histories, beyond the achievements of Bandung, but nonetheless remain connected to the historical effects of this event. Indeed, the working method of historical change in this book is neither predictably dialectical nor modally discursive but centered on a complex echo and feedback effect—how an event can produce unforeseen consequences that ripple out and, in time, retroactively reshape the original contours and meaning of that event.

These features of historicism ultimately underline the antinomies of Bandung once more—its great men origins versus its popular embrace, its imaginative promise versus its practical failure, its promotion of solidarity versus the existence of fissures that resided at the conference from the start. These tensions leave open the question of the present uses of Bandung. Extending from this final observation, if a concluding lesson can be drawn, it regards the political implications of historicizing Bandung today—Bandung as politics. Beyond matters of elitism versus populism—indeed, by working through these very issues—the Bandung conference invokes a set of queries about political imagination: not only the origins of political visions of the future, but their destinations. Returning to the start of this preface, another vital interlocutor in this book is Benedict Anderson and his study Imagined Communities (1983), a work that remains influential in part for its integration of popular and elite cultures in discussing the formation of nationalism. This book pushes Anderson’s argument further to understand the role of political imagination beyond the nation-state vis-à-vis other communities, but in doing so it provokes uncertainties about the dimensions and longevity of what has been called Afro-Asian solidarity, a transnational variation of the horizontal comradeship Anderson used to describe nationalism.³⁸ The fracturing of Afro-Asianism was not unique; pan-Africanism and pan-Arabism, for example, also experienced tension and division, leading to moments of failure. There was little purpose in sustaining such ideas unless they served an end, which explains the multiplicity of their forms: pragmatism ruled. Less comprehensible is the academic compulsion to take apart solidarities, if the end result is a retreat to preceding structures of knowledge—a Cold War humanism of area studies, as promoted in the United States, and its deeper foundations in Western colonial epistemologies. Both continue to infiltrate contemporary thought, bearing traces of a divide-and-rule strategy through their passions for difference. While cataloging shortcomings is essential in order to strengthen future opportunities, favoring such an approach can carry intellectual and political risks, principal among them being the reproduction of preexisting orders of knowledge and, thus, maintaining a political status quo.³⁹

The point is to historicize political imaginations and, in doing so, to rethink our own academic imagination in the present: to aspire to a new humanism. The belatedness of Bandung—that there was no postcolonial innocence, that participants were already entangled in Cold War alliances—can be drawn too far. Although the Cold War shaped, damaged, and at times ended the political fortunes of certain national and transnational endeavors, it also enabled others to succeed. The Cold War was not solely a threat to independence, but often facilitated independence. As Heonik Kwon has written, not only should the Cold War be more broadly understood as introducing new forms of political and economic modernity, but cold war history is fundamentally an anthropological problem in the sense that histories from the periphery are indispensable for revising the uniformity of representations that emanate from former Cold War centers. Or, as he puts it elsewhere, the Cold War was not just a struggle for power, but a struggle for meaning.⁴⁰ The title term afterlives is important in this regard, indicating a vibrant form of historical persistence that highlights this ongoing effort. Afterlives suggest more than legacies and