Afro-Asia as method: Bandung, the production of postcolonial space, and the cruel optimism of the 1960s

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article provides a conceptual intervention regarding how postcolonial space was reimagined in the aftermath of global decolonization during the mid-twentieth century. It argues that political imagination operates not only temporally by rethinking pasts, presents, and futures, but it equally functions spatially by reconsidering normative geographies such as the continent and the nation-state. This article examines in particular how “Afro-Asia” as a space was invoked and generated in the wake of the 1955 Asian-African Conference in Bandung, Indonesia, by African newspapers and periodicals. Assisted by the popularity and growing mythology of the Bandung meeting, the term “Afro-Asia” evolved in the years after 1955 as shorthand for collectively referencing the countries that participated at the summit to becoming a wider point of orientation for countries that sought to participate in a broader intercontinental endeavor. This larger inclusion combined with the failure to hold a “second Bandung“ in 1965 contributed to the eventual decline of “Afro-Asia” as a new territorial space. Nonetheless, the legacy of “Afro-Asia” as a spatial idea for readdressing political, historical, and cultural geographies can still be found in recent work in Indian Ocean studies and China-Africa relations.