Asian-African Conference Research Articles

The Midnight Ride of Kwame Nkrumah and Other Fables of Bandung (Ban-doong)

The battle against colonialism has been a long one, and do you know that today is a famous anniversary in that battle? On the eighteenth day of April, one thousand seven hundred and seventy five, just one hundred and eighty years ago, Paul Revere rode at midnight through the New England countryside, warning of the approach of British troops and of the opening of the American War of Independence, the first successful anti-colonial war in history. About this midnight ride the poet Longfellow wrote:A cry of defiance, and not of fear,A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door,And a word that shall echo for evermore!1Two conferences were held at in April 1955. One was the real conference, about which not very much is known, about which people care even less, and which has faded away like a bad dream. The other was a quite different conference, a crystallization of what people wanted to believe had happened which, as a myth, took on reality in the Principles and, later, in the Spirit. The real conference aroused interest mainly because it contributed towards the solution of a crisis then much in the news but which scarcely troubles to record.2Myths or the identity stories a group tells about itself are found not just in grade-school primers or nationalist tracts but also in advanced scholarship, in professional journals, and in conference papers. Consider the case of the Asian-African Conference at Bandung, Indonesia. It turns out that is the imagined birthplace of not one but two that some scholars continue to confuse with (for lack of a better term) the historical process, and that in many cases they elide into one. The first is routinely referred to as non-alignment or the non-aligned movement. The second is a bit more unwieldy, an emerging global racial consciousness or a movement of the darker nations. This essay challenges both these ways of thinking about the politics of and its aftermath. The problem is that these myths are no more firmly rooted in reality than the belief-reproduced by two generations of journalists, bloggers, and scholars-that Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana and Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia were there.3They continue to exist not least because so little scholarship has sought to explore them. No historians have published studies based on research in the archives of the actually existing international organization, the Non-Aligned Movement (or NAM), founded in Belgrade in 1961 at the First Conference of Heads of State or Government of Non-Aligned Countries, not at in 1955.4 It is headquartered in New York with a rotating chairmanship held at this writing by the Egyptian foreign minister Amr Mohammad Kamal, who took over following the overthrow of the country's president Hosni Mubarak in January 2011. The major scholarship on the NAM is now a few decades old, produced mostly by journalists and political scientists specializing in international relations, and is still worth reading-not least for the routine warnings to avoid what the political scientist Peter Willetts in 1978 called the distortions of history that solidarities produce. He was referring to speeches by the Nigerian and Sri Lankan ambassadors at a 1976 Howard University conference marking the fifteenth anniversary of the NAM. Both diplomats recalled that the road to Belgrade had passed through Bandung. The Cuban and Yugoslavian ambassadors, from key states in the NAM's founding that were neither Asian nor African, disagreed, on grounds broader than those of identity or their own leaderships' legitimization strategies. As Willetts put it, and this is a key point, Bandung in its composition and its decisions was the antithesis of non-alignment.5 Willetts was updating an already existing, well-documented and argued interpretation, one which the political scientist Itty Abraham sustains in his 2009 account of Indian foreign policy change. …

“A Personal Reflection on Norodom Sihanouk and Zhou Enlai: An Extraordinary Friendship on the Fringes of the Cold War”

“A Personal Reflection on Norodom Sihanouk and Zhou Enlai: An Extraordinary Friendship on the Fringes of the Cold War” Julio A. Jeldres (bio) I was sixteen years old when I first read about Norodom Sihanouk1 and Cambodia. Jacqueline Kennedy’s visit to Cambodia in November 1967 had been widely reported by the press in my homeland, Chile, where her assassinated husband was greatly admired. Through Jackie Kennedy’s visit to Cambodia, I became interested in Norodom Sihanouk’s fascinating life, totally unaware that, years later, our paths would cross and I would become his private secretary. My Cambodian friends often tell me that it was my destiny. In 1967, I wanted to know more about Cambodia. Since there was no information available, I wrote to the Cambodian mission at the United Nations. I found it unbelievable, but four months later I received a handwritten letter back from Sihanouk himself. That began our friendship, which was first conducted through correspondence.2 After Sihanouk was deposed in March 1970, I discovered that the local New China News Agency branch in Santiago, Chile, carried copies in Spanish of all of Sihanouk’s statements made in the Chinese capital a day earlier. It didn’t seem to make sense that a Communist regime would extend such courtesies to a former monarch. This led me to one aspect of Sihanouk’s political life that I found especially intriguing: his association with Chinese premier Zhou Enlai. This relationship seemed to be a very special one between the head of state of a Buddhist kingdom and the prime minister of [End Page 323] a Communist state. As a novice in international affairs, I knew little about how relationships operated between states, yet it still seemed strange to me that a ruler who claimed to be descended from the kings of Angkor had a unique relationship with the political leader of a country ideologically opposed to monarchical government. I sought to gain a better understanding of the Sihanouk-Zhou friendship when I began researching my first degree in Melbourne, Australia. However, in those days there was little written about Cambodia’s relations with China, as attention was mainly focused on the ongoing conflict ravaging Vietnam. During this period, I continued to correspond with Sihanouk as circumstances allowed. Then, in 1981, I met Sihanouk for the first time during a visit to North Korea, a trip he organized for his “young Chilean friend” when Sihanouk was the honored guest of President Kim Il-Sung. The trip came about after I had informed Sihanouk—in one of my letters to him—that I had won a ticket in a raffle for a trip to Hong Kong. Sihanouk said that Hong Kong was not far from North Korea and that he would ask the North Korean president’s permission to receive me at his own residence in Pyongyang. Little did I know that this trip was going to change my life; the following year I joined the private secretariat of Sihanouk. I was initially based in Bangkok but often traveled to Beijing, where Sihanouk had, once again, established his headquarters following Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia. In Beijing I was able once again to pursue the topic that interested me: the relationship between Sihanouk and Zhou Enlai. In this essay, I trace the relationship between the two leaders from their first meeting at the Ban-dung Asian-African Conference in April 1955 until the last time they met, in August 1975, just before Sihanouk returned to Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge regime and lived for three years under house arrest. In Beijing, which again became my permanent base in 1988, I began mingling with a select group of Khmer speakers in the Chinese foreign ministry whose careers were directed toward managing China’s policies toward Cambodia and its immediate neighbors, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam. In most cases, they served two or three postings at the Chinese embassy in Phnom Penh, then in Bangkok, Hanoi, or Vientiane, from where they followed those countries’ relations with Cambodia. Beginning as translators to the embassy or the ambassador, they rose in seniority up the diplomatic ladder and, in some cases, became ambassadors to Cambodia...

Retrieving the Bandung Conference … moment by moment

The Asian–African Conference at Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955 has been written into twentieth-century history as ‘a moment’ made up of ‘little histories’, as the titles of the two volumes reviewed here suggest. Both belong to the literature on the Bandung Conference published since its fiftieth anniversary, the broad scope of which underscores the intricate and diffuse nature of the Conference. While offering new perspectives, the contributors also add to its ambiguity: Was Bandung a continuation of the struggle against imperialism? An episode of the Cold War? A protest against centuries of racial humiliation? Or a communist plot? It may well have comprised elements of all these.

A Weekend with Richard Wright

In 1955 the famous African American writer Richard Wright traveled to Southeast Asia to observe and report on the Asian-African Conference in Bandung, Indonesia. A watershed moment in the history of decolonization, the meeting, also known as the Bandung Conference, drew representatives from twenty-nine newly independent Asian and African countries, including the conference's sponsors: Burma, Ceylon, India, and Indonesia. At the conference's conclusion, as part of a “final communique,” participating countries issued their Declaration on the Promotion of World Peace and Cooperation, which advanced ten principles, ranging from “[r]espect for fundamental human rights” to “[r]ecognition of the equality of all races and of the equality of all nations” to abstention from “serv[ing] the particular interests of any big powers” (Kahin 84). As an important precursor of the Nonaligned Movement, which was officially organized in 1961, the Bandung Conference set the stage for newly independent states to assert and strengthen their autonomy in a world often polarized by the United States and the Soviet Union.

‘CHOU GAGS CRITICS IN BANDOENG’ or How the Media Framed Premier Zhou Enlai at the Bandung Conference, 1955

AbstractAt the Asian-African Conference at Bandung, Indonesia, in April 1955, the world's press concentrated its gaze on Premier Zhou Enlai of the People's Republic of China. Premier Zhou's every gesture, interaction and statement was scrutinized for evidence that his motivations at Bandung were antagonistic to Western interests. This preoccupation with the motivations of the Chinese was, however, no new phenomenon. By 1955, literary tropes of the ‘Yellow Peril’ had been firmly established in the Western imagination and, after 1949, almost seamlessly made their transition into fears of infiltrating communist Chinese ‘Reds’.The first half of this paper explores the historical roots of the West's perceptions of the Chinese, through the literary works of Daniel Defoe to the pulp fiction of Sax Rohmer's Dr Fu Manchu series, which ran from 1917 to 1959. It then examines how this negative template was mobilised by the print media at the height of the Cold War to characterize Premier Zhou Enlai, not only as untrustworthy, but also as antagonistically anti-Western. This reading of representations of Premier Zhou at Bandung, as well as the literary tropes propagated in support of eighteenth and nineteenth-century imperial expansion, exposes a history of Western (mis)interpretations of China, and sheds light upon the media network's role in constructing a Chinese enemy in the mid-1950s.

AT THE RENDEZVOUS OF DECOLONIZATION

This article examines the 1955 Asian-African Conference held in Bandung, Indonesia with a particular focus on contextualizing its final commuiqué, a key document of the early postcolonial period. Although the Bandung meeting became and important symbol of Third World solidarity by serving as a precursor or the Non-Aligned Movement, the escalating politics of the Cold War equally compromised its aims. Acknowledging this complexity provides insight the challenges faced by postcolonial countries in the aftermath of mid-twentieth-century decolonization, armid stated ideals of anti-imperialism, economic and cultural exchange, and world peace.

The Four Faces of Bandung: Detainees, Soldiers, Revolutionaries and Statesmen

This article seeks to provide a textured and nuanced conception of the first Asian-African Conference (18-24 April 1955) by structuring four simultaneous, “mosaic” perspectives (for India, China, Indonesia and the Philippines) of that multifaceted event. By eschewing hegemonic “Cold War” and “triumphalist” interpretations, one purposefully avoids a rehash of the roles of the USA and the Soviet Union. Their role, in this study, is peripheral. This article highlights the complexity of the conference by a series of analytical snap shots, multiple focuses, recollections and memories, which emphasise the frequently neglected Babel-like environment of the Bandung Conference. The resulting analysis provides capsules of self-contained experiences rather than one unifying story. Ultimately, the highly contentious and disparate viewpoints that the participants brought to the conference underscored the difficulties that Cold War superpowers experienced in creating political-military blocs friendly to their cause. Third World countries, by the nature of their decolonization process and their political expediencies, succeeded in preventing both the superpowers from creating monolithic blocs.

Asia … whose Asia? A ‘return to the future’ of a Sino-Indic Asian Community

This article is an attempt to provide a corrective to a marked Sinocentrism in contemporary debates on regional integration in Asia. In order to do so, firstly, as a heuristic device, a crucial distinction is made between ‘regionalization’, as involving multifaceted integrative socio-economic processes, and ‘regionalism’, defined as a form of identity construction akin to nationalism. Secondly, a degree of historical depth is proposed to better explain recent developments. Finally, throughout the article, an interdisciplinary approach is taken involving employing realist, historical/sociological institutionalist and constructivist perspectives in the area of international relations. The first two East Asian summits are contextualized in relation to various conceptualizations of an Asian Community over the last century or so. Particular attention is given to the 1955 Asian-African Conference in Bandung as a watershed in this evolution. Varying conceptions of East Asia as part of a larger, transpacific regional entity (APEC) and in, and of, itself (East Asian Economic Group/ASEAN +3) are examined. In situating the first two East Asian summits five developments of significance are examined. These are: a continuing Japanese role in setting the regional agenda; the ambivalence of China's positioning vis-à-vis neighbouring countries; the re-entry of Central Asia in the Asian regional equation; India's ‘return to Asia’; and efforts to maintain ASEAN's centrality in regional construction. These factors, it is argued, are militating towards a return to the Sino-Indic Asia of Bandung. It is thus suggested that notions of an Asian Community involving only Northeast and Southeast Asia are now rejoined by a concept of a Greater Asia. While the historical roots of this conception partly explain its salience, it nevertheless competes with other complementary – and antagonistic – definitions of an Asian Community of more recent lineage.

AfroAsian Encounters: Culture, History, Politics (review)

Reviewed by: AfroAsian Encounters: Culture, History, Politics cynthia a. young (bio) AfroAsian Encounters: Culture, History, Politics. Edited by Heike-Raphael Hernandez and Shannon Steen. New York: New York University Press, 2006. In AfroAsian Encounters, Hernandez and Steen set out to "examine AfroAsian interconnections across a variety of cultural, political, and historical contexts in order to examine how the two groups have interacted, and have construed one another, as well as how they have been set in opposition to each other by white systems of racial domination" (1). Although this is a lot to tackle, the two editors generally pull it off. Joining Bill Mullen's Afro-Orientalism and Andrew F. Jones and Nikhil Pal Singh's special issue of positions entitled The Afro Asian Century, this wide-ranging, ambitious project spans both centuries and continents, covering everything from Indo Caribbean art to African Canadian identity, Asian American hip hop to the swing Mikados of the late 1930s. This breadth is the volume's major strength and chief weakness. On the one hand, the essays engage with several disciplines: anthropology, ethnic studies, American studies, pop culture studies, sociology and history, and multiple mediums: literature, film, painting, music, martial arts. On the other hand, that eclecticism threatens the volume's coherence, giving it a somewhat amorphous feel. I suspect this is due in part to the fact that these essays broadly share a common topic, but they do not share a methodological, intellectual or ideological approach that helps frame them. AfroAsian Encounters is divided into four sections: "Positioning AfroAsian Racial Identities"; "Confronting the Color Hierarchy"; "Performing AfroAsian Identities" and "Celebrating Unity." If each section's contents at times feel arbitrary—many essays could go in multiple sections—that is because these topics inevitably bleed into one another. [End Page 316] Since his Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting is a clear influence, it is fitting that Vijay Prashad's Foreword opens the collection. "Bandung is Done" situates the essays in the context of the 1955 Asian-African Conference where 29 countries met to declare Third World independence and anticolonial solidarity. In the wake of deadly cultural nationalisms—including the U.S.' "War on Terror"—and structural adjustment, the Bandung dream might seem both naïve and hopelessly outdated. And yet, Prashad argues, if we wish to combat global inequality and "corporate multiculturalism," we need work like AfroAsian Encounters to unearth the "epistemological and historical archive of solidarity" (xxi) needed to forge new anti-imperial, anti-racist and anti-capitalist visions. Though every essay does not live up to Prashad's ambitions, several begin to fill in that archive. In Part I, Sanda Mayzaw Lwin's essay on the Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision explores how Justice Harlan's dissenting opinion appealed to nativist sentiment by decrying the fact that the "absolutely excluded" "Chinaman" (21) could legally cross the color line while black citizens could not. In "Crossings in Prose: Jade Snow Wong and the Demand for a New Kind of Expert," Cynthia Tolentino shows how early sociology, known for pathologizing its black objects of study, simultaneously defined a "process by which Asian Americans could become knowledge producers of exotic information" (39). Intervening in race(ist) discourse, Wong positioned Chinese Americans as "transnational subjects," moving them from object to subject status. Central to AfroAsian Encounter's historical archive is the theme of racial passing and performance, with two essays handling the topic particularly well. Steen's "Racing American Modernity: Black Atlantic Negotiations of Asia and the 'Swing' Mikados" is a rich and fascinating look at how black performers impersonating feudal Japanese represented Asia as a "site through which the United States would create a modern status distinct from that of Europe" (169). Blackness then became "the vehicle through which Asia could be Americanized" (169). In the more contemporary example of the Jackie Chan–Chris Tucker Rush Hour films, Mita Banerjee argues that Chan's "straining of the confines of the minstrel form is enabled by [Tucker's] adhesion to and his entrapment in minstrelsy" (205). Their AfroAsian partnership functions to both flatten multicultural L.A. and expand the cultural space afforded to Asians and Asian Americans on screen. In each case, racial minstrelsy...

Rethinking the “Third World”

Algerian diplomat Lakhdar Brahimi has a distinguished history in the politics of what has long been known as the “Third World,” most of which were once beleaguered colonies of Europe. After the Asian-African Conference in Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955—the first coming together of the non-aligned movement—Lakhdar was sent to Indonesia by the National Liberation Front of Algeria to open its first office in Asia. Over the years, Lakhdar met and chatted with everyone: from Che to Nyerere to Nasser to Nehru to Sukarno. He served Algeria as ambassador and foreign minister. He was under-secretary-general of the League of Arab States. Most recently, at the United Nations, he undertook special missions on behalf of the secretary-general in Congo, Yemen, Liberia, Nigeria, and Sudan. His last post for the United Nations was in Afghanistan, where he led the United Nations Peace Conference on Afghanistan in Bonn at the end of 2001, and then served in Kabul as the special representative of the secretary-general until 2004. Lakhdar is presently at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton as a guest of the director. We talked at the Institute about past and present trends in the poorer countries of the world.

"The Compelling Dialogue of Freedom": Human Rights at the Bandung Conference

This article explores the place of human rights at the 1955 Asian-African Conference in Bandung, a meeting that founded the Third World as a political entity. Contrary to most existing accounts of the conference, which emphasize the anti-colonialism and latent anti-Westernism of the participants, it will argue that there was a significant positive engagement with human rights by a range of newly decolonized states. When recognition of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was challenged by Communist China, that document found enthusiastic champions at the conference, including Charles Malik, one of the major figures involved in its creation.

Towards a Bandung spirit‐based civil society movement: reflection from Yogyakarta commemoration of Bandung Asian‐African Conference

This article deals with a commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Bandung Asian–African Conference 1955. Held in a modest way, in Yogyakarta, Bandung and Bangkok, the commemoration leaves, a durable contribution: the conference book – an anthology of reflections related to this world historical event. Written by 16 socially engaged intellectuals, academics and activists from Africa, Asia, Latin America, Europe, and USA, the book is entitled ‘BANDUNG 2005: Rethinking Solidarity in Global Society. The Challenge of Globalisation for Social and Solidarity Movements.’ The objective of the work is to look for alternatives to the present undesirable World Order and Globalisation. Put in the perspective of social history (of social struggle, social movement, or social change), the Yogyakarta Commemoration of the Bandung Asian–African Conference deserves close attention. The actors involved in the publication and in the meeting, the messages they delivered and the projects they proposed, are too important to be ignored. This article presents an analytical review on the commemoration, especially on the content of the book, completed by a concluding remark on the prospect of the movement.

Sino-Indian Friendship in the Nehru Era

This paper focuses on Sino-Indian relations in the early Nehru era, i.e., the friendly relations between China and India from 1947 to 1958. It reveals that in the early part of Nehru's period, China and India had intimate bilateral relations characterised by mutual support and cooperation in many decisive national, regional and international issues, such as establishment of diplomatic relations, admission of PRC to the United Nations, the Korean crisis, friendly exchanges in the Initiation Phase from 1947 to 1953 and the Panchsheel Agreement, Indo-China issue, Asian-African conference, Taiwan and Goa questions, and mutual visits of high-ranking leaders in the Honeymoon Phase from 1954 to 1958. Furthermore, it discusses the factors contributing to the intimacy and cordiality of Sino-Indian relations in the early years of the Nehru era. These include the internal context, external context and personal factor. The internal context comprises both the historical conditions and the existing realistic situation that China and India faced. The external context was constituted by the circumstances of the global Cold War, marked by the American-Pakistani alliance, American-Chinese enmity, and Indo-Pakistani hostility, whereby Sino-Indian friendship came into being logically. The personal factor stemmed from Nehru's ideas and his stand on Sino-Indian friendship.

The “Spirit of Bandung” 1955–1985: Thirty years since the Bandung Conference

On 24th and 25th April, 1985, delegates from more than 80 Asian and African countries gathered in the Indonesian city of Bandung at the “Gedung Merdeka”, or “House of Freedom”, to commemorate the famous Bandung Asian-African Conference held thirty years previously. What, in retrospect, has been the historical and political significance of Bandung? What have been the achievements of its heirs so far?

China's Failure in Africa

A decade has elapsed since the People's Republic of China first appeared on the African scene.' During this period, Africa increasingly assumed an important place in Chinese foreign policy. An intensive drive to win friends and gain influence ensued. Utilizing a vast variety of foreign policy instruments, China initiated a major program to penetrate the African states. One index of the overt success of this massive campaign was that by 1965 eighteen of the thirty-six independent African states had recognized the People's Republic of China. The abortive second Asian-African Conference of 1965, however, represented a major landmark in Chinese-African relations. International and internal developments involving Africa have since been strongly unfavorable to the Chinese cause. The indefinite postponement of the Algiers Conference constituted a major setback. Subsequently, two African states (the Central African Republic and Dahomey) broke diplomatic relations with China, while China's relations with previously friendly African states (e.g., Ghana and Kenya) have become seriously strained.2 It should be emphasized, however, that though the drive to gain influence has undoubtedly suffered setbacks, China can neither be excluded from the contemporary African scene (in 1966 fifteen African states continued to recognize the People's Republic of China) nor has Peking given signs of abandoning the African sphere. On the contrary, Chou En-lai's scheduled but postponed visit to Cairo early in 1966 and Lin Piao's well publicized comments of 1965 on the role of Africa as part of the world countryside against the world cities of North America and Western Europe are indicative of China's continued interest in this vast continent.3 Despite China's long-term interest in Africa, the recent setbacks raise major questions concerning contemporary and future Chinese-African relations. One basic question, of course, is: What factors contributed to China's failures and what implications do these adversities have upon China's African policy? There have been indications that Peking has been asking

The Second Asian-African Conference: Preliminary Bouts

Research Article| July 01 1965 The Second Asian-African Conference: Preliminary Bouts Franklin B. Weinstein Franklin B. Weinstein Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Far Eastern Survey (1936) 5 (7): 359–373. https://doi.org/10.2307/2642295 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Franklin B. Weinstein; The Second Asian-African Conference: Preliminary Bouts. Far Eastern Survey 25 March 1936; 5 (7): 359–373. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/2642295 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAsian Survey Search This content is only available via PDF. Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The Second Asian-African Conference: Preliminary Bouts

The Second Asian-African Conference: Preliminary Bouts

The Asian-African Conference

The Asian-African Conference

The Asian-African Conference, Bandung, Indonesia, April 1955. By George McTurnan Kahin. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1956. pp. vii, 88. $2.00 cloth, $1.25 paper. - The Indian Yearbook of International Affairs, 1954. Charles Henry Alexandrowicz (ed.). Published under the Auspices of The Indian Study Group of International Affairs. Madras: University of Madras, 1954. pp. ix, 454. Rs. 10. - The United

The Asian-African Conference, Bandung, Indonesia, April 1955. By George McTurnan Kahin. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1956. pp. vii, 88. $2.00 cloth, $1.25 paper. - The Indian Yearbook of International Affairs, 1954. Charles Henry Alexandrowicz (ed.). Published under the Auspices of The Indian Study Group of International Affairs. Madras: University of Madras, 1954. pp. ix, 454. Rs. 10. - The United

The Asian-African Conference. Bandung, Indonesia, April 1955.

The Asian-African Conference. Bandung, Indonesia, April 1955.