Bandung Conference Research Articles

An Asian Drama: The Asian Relations Conference, 1947

ABSTRACTThe Asian Relations Conference has long served as a historical footnote to the more famous Bandung Conference of 1955. In this paper, however, I argue that this Conference needs to be read and analysed independently. As the opening act of decolonial solidarity, this Conference juxtaposes the moment and the movement of decolonisation, alerting us to the promises and pitfalls of both. In particular one needs to be conscious of its Eurocentric readings which almost always place the ‘Third World’ within the context of the Cold War project and thus are incapable of understanding its historical relevance.

AFRICA in the INDIAN Imagination

Little over six decades ago, in 1955 to be precise, Indonesia hosted an important gathering that sought to make a major contribution to the ordering of the system of international relations in the post-Second World War period and the onset of the Cold War. This was the first Afro-Asian conference which was held in Bandung, Indonesia on 18-24 April 1955. It was sponsored by India, Indonesia, Burma, Ceylon, Pakistan and an additional 24 Asian and African countries. Fifty years later, on 2024 April 2005, the second Asian-African Conference was also held in Jakarta and Bandung. The Bandung Conference considered problems of common interest and concern to countries of Asia and Africa and discussed ways and means by which their people could achieve fuller economic, cultural and political cooperation, thus launching an era of Afro-Asian cooperation.

Black-Asian Counterintimacies: Reading Sui Sin Far in Jamaica

Black-Asian Counterintimacies:Reading Sui Sin Far in Jamaica Christine "Xine" Yao (bio) In "Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of a Eurasian," Edith Maude Eaton, writing as Sui Sin Far, reflects on her time in Jamaica as a white-passing mixed-race woman.1 Rumor of her Chinese ancestry provokes a white English naval officer to seek her out for sexual favors, a scenario still all too familiar to women, particularly women of color, today: a predatory conversation sheathed in friendly euphemisms. At first Far believes his visit has to do with her work as a journalist, but his repeated "silly and offensive laugh" suggests otherwise.2 When she attempts to dismiss him, he laughs again, "There's always plenty of time for good times. That's what I am here for."3 After commenting on her "nice little body," he invites her to sail with him where "I will tell you all about the sweet little Chinese girls I met when we were at Hong Kong. They're not so shy!"4 The officer's framing of her presumed affective and sexual availability, and the foregrounding of his own sexual [End Page 197] and social prerogative, are an everyday life manifestation of what Lisa Lowe names a "'political economy' of intimacy … a particular calculus governing the production, distribution, and possession of intimacy" predicated on empire and settler colonialism.5 The man's proposition to Far is a demand for her friendliness because those other Chinese girls in Hong Kong are "not so shy." In her rejection of his desire for intimacy, she risks the dangerous backlash that attends injured white masculinity along with broader social consequences that could impact the relative privilege of her personal and professional life in the Caribbean. Still, instead of a "friendly" relationship to whiteness, Sui Sin Far seeks alternative intimacies. In the same section of her memoir she juxtaposes this incident with musings about her position as a white-passing mixed-race Chinese woman in relation to her observations about antiblackness in the West Indies. Despite the warnings of the English who tell her to fear the "'brown boys' of the island," the writer considered the mother of Asian North American literature affirms a sense of transnational solidarity between peoples of color in her affective racial identifications. "I too am of the 'brown people' of the earth," she confides to her readers, prefiguring, in this assertion, the anti-colonial alliance between African and Asian nations that would be formalized in 1955 at the Bandung Conference in Indonesia.6 Intimacy operates, here, as a heuristic for understanding how the racialized and gendered pressures of domesticity, sentimentality, and sexuality are imbricated with the projects of empire. These exploitative relations undergird the transnational violences of settler colonialism, slavery, and indentured servitude—systems which, as Lowe argues, enable the liberal fictions of white Western individuals, who are able to claim intimacy as one of the privileges associated with the private sphere, as a property of their citizenship in modern civil society. In the shift from the late nineteenth-century threatening "Yellow Peril" to modern-day deserving "model minority," Asian Americans, particularly those of East Asian descent, are lured by false promises of inclusion into this liberal fiction on the basis of intimate affiliation with whiteness. Among the processes of comparative racialization that emerge from transnational intimacies, Ellen Wu traces how Asian Americans were complicit in the anti-black creation of the "model minority" category in the American cultural imaginary.7 Nonetheless, the solidarity work of activists like Grace Lee Boggs and Yuri Kochiyama, along with studies of earlier black-Asian cultural and political engagements by scholars like Edlie Wong and Julia H. Lee, indicates an alternative genealogy of counterintimacies [End Page 198] that disrupts those aligned with the afterlife of imperial exploitation.8 In defiance of the coercive pressures made manifest through sexual violence and emotional labor, the mixed-race Asian and black women of Sui Sin Far's fiction and nonfiction writings reorient these indices of transnational power relations away from their focus on whiteness and toward the possibility of resistance through affective connections that center peoples of color. In Far's rediscovered Jamaican stories and journalism...

SOUTH-SOUTH COOPERATION IN THE CHÁVEZ ERA IN VENEZUELA

South-South Cooperation (SSC) has become one of the major trends in the International Relations of the new millennium. Initiatives of political cooperation, economic and technical assistance can be traced back to the 1960’s, for example the Bandung Conference of non-aligned countries or the creation of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) under Ra u l Prebisch’s aegis [Braveboy-Wagner 2009; Prebisch 1954, 1969]. Nevertheless, the emergence of China and the BRICS and a new period of high oil prices have produced an increased involvement of middle-income states in initiatives of cooperation with other countries of the Global South. Venezuela has been an actor in this wave of SSC during the government of Hugo Ch a vez. Certainly, SSC is not new in the Venezuelan external relations because Caracas implemented programs of cooperation to supply oil in special conditions to some Central American and Caribbean countries since the 1970’s. Example of this were the Puerto Ordaz Agreement, approved during the Carlos Andr e s P e rez administration (1974-1979) and the San Jos e Agreement, a Venezuelan-Mexican initiative implemented in the early 1980’s [Grayson 1985]. Similarly, Carlos Andr e s P e rez played a role in the promotion of a New International Economic Order and in the establishment of the Latin American Economic System (known in Spanish as SELA) [P e rez 1980, 1983]. However, the logic of Venezuelan South-South cooperation was transformed since the rise to power of Ch a vez in 1999 and in particular after his victory in the recall referendum convened in 2004. Ch a vez aimed to transform the Venezuelan foreign policy since the beginning of his government. One of his goals was obviously the deepening of the relations with the Global South. Venezuela as a middle-income country became a driver in the new dynamics of SSC both in Latin America and the Caribbean and beyond the Western Hemisphere. This paper analyses this increasing involvement of Venezuela in initiatives of SCC, in particular the reasons that led Ch a vez to promote those initiatives. Due to the particular narrative furthered by the Venezuelan government to explain its SSC agenda, supposedly based on solidarity, complementarity and cooperation, this paper compares Venezuelan strategy of international cooperation with more traditional forms of North-South Cooperation (NSC). To achieve such a goal, a qualitative methodology is used in the paper based on the review of the literature on international cooperation and on the evaluation of international cooperation promoted by the Venezuelan government.

Indonesian Notebook: A Sourcebook on Richard Wright and the Bandung Conference, edited by Brian Russell Roberts and Keith Foulcher

<i>Indonesian Notebook: A Sourcebook on Richard Wright and the Bandung Conference</i>, edited by Brian Russell Roberts and Keith Foulcher

Byline, Richard Wright: Articles from “The Daily Worker” and “New Masses”

Byline, Richard Wright: Articles from “The Daily Worker” and “New Masses”

The Philippine-US Relations: Living or Leaving the Bandung Spirit?

The Philippines had its own share of colonial past. Just as other Asian and African countries which were under the Western colonizers, the Philippines partook of the momentous event that proposed an alternative to the world order dominated by superpowers—the Bandung Conference. The principles collectively known as Bandung Spirit were embraced by the Philippines and had a clear understanding of its symbolic significance. Yet such understanding of these principles was coupled with compromises on the Philippines relations with the United States. Over the decades, the Philippines had to do a balancing act between its being sovereign, independent state and its recognition of the relevance of its past colonial master—the US. Hence, this raises the question of whether the Philippines is living or leaving the Bandung Spirit. Specifically, this paper assesses whether the Philippines still upholds the same Bandung Spirit in its traditional form or has it given a contemporary understanding of it. The paper argues that the Philippine-US relations remain to be an evident display of US presence in Southeast Asia albeit redefined to blend with the Bandung Spirit.

“Easternization” of Post-Western International Order: Appertaining Confucianism into Bandung Conference Legacy

This paper seeks to develop non-Western theory in IR, particularly appertaining Confucianism into the formation of new global order. Arguably, the role of China in international order has generated debates for IR theorists, which ended in two main conclusions, China as a new hegemonic power or responsible power. It is presumably caused by the diffusion of power in post-Cold War global order, in which China seeks for revival after the ‘century of humiliation’ caused by Western presence in early 20th century. Moreover, the model of China’s leadership under Xi Jinping in which global order is assumed to be related with the revival of Confucianism. Stressing on mutual cooperation, China seeks to shift the international paradigm disorder dominated by the western idea of materialism. Distinctively, this paper will illustrate the notion of Chinese role in the global order by taking its connection with the formation of Bandung Conference. As one of the global leading power, China could play greater role in international sphere, among other by uniting members of developing countries in the Bandung Conference to revivethe alternative way of global order management. Furthermore, the promotion of Chinese Dream as the manifestation of the essence of confucianism under Xi Jinping could become the starting point toward “easternization” of global order under Bandung Conference legacy.

The Long March from Bandung: The Ghost of the Bandung Spirit in Contemporary Relations between China and Africa

When Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡锦涛) gave the opening address at the Jakarta reception of the Asian-African Business Summit (亚非商业峰会) in 2005, he characterized contemporary relations between China and various African states thusly “[In] the world today, economic globalization is further developing…[this] presents Asian and African countries with rare opportunities as well as severe challenges…. [We] must…develop a new type of strategic partnership between Asia and Africa...to carry on the Bandung spirit and contribute to the continuous progress in Asia and Africa”. The importance of the Bandung Conference in the Cold War era is beyond debate; what has been debated is its lasting relevance. This paper examines the global economic rise of post-Cold War China and its “new strategic partnerships” (新型战略伙伴关系) with various African states and argues that the “partnerships”, which specifically promote pragmatic cooperation and mutual benefits between the two regions in trade, industry, investment, finance, embody the “Bandung Spirit” (万隆精神). It argues that what we are seeing now in China’s relationship with Africa is the culmination of a process begun by Premier Zhou Enlai (1898-1976) at the Bandung Conference of 1955.

The Institute of Pacific Relations: pan-Pacific and pan-Asian visions of international order

Between the world wars, the often under-rated Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR) was perhaps the most visible and impressive international foreign policy think tank, an ambitious and idealistic effort to establish a transnational knowledge network. The IPR was among the rather few interwar international organizations that sought to accord Asians genuine input into its administration and activities. By World War II, the IPR had become a focus for nationalist, anti-imperialist, and anti-colonial sentiment within its assorted Asian member states and also in North America. Such tendencies perhaps peaked at the pioneering 1947 Asian Relations Conference organized by one of its member organizations, the Indian Council on World Affairs. Despite its stated pan-Pacific outlook, the IPR may have thereby encouraged the pronounced pan-Asian outlook and consciousness that characterized the 1955 Bandung Conference. Ironically but presciently, the IPR’s checkered experiences also suggested that conflicting national interests dividing member states had great potential to undercut attempts to establish broader transnational groupings.

From Statesmen to Technocrats to Financiers: Development Agents in the Third World

This chapter is part of an edited collection—edited by L.Eslava, M.Fakhri and V.Nesiah—that revisits the various political, economic, legal, and social legacies of the Bandung Conference—the 1955 meeting of twenty-nine Asian and African countries in Bandung, Indonesia. The chapter analyzes three modes of development expertise and agency at work since Bandung against the political and economic ideals espoused at the conference and argues for the relevance of the current rise of finance and its forms of expertise in this genealogy. It traces three sets of actors who—drawing on different sets of values, practices, and forms of knowledge—successively advanced and complicated Bandung’s political, economic, and social legacy from 1955 to the present. The interplay among them is best understood as a series of transformations of development expertise reflecting the ascendancy of three types of agents of development: statesmen, technocrats, and financiers. These transformations—and the foregrounding of particular agents in particular moments—reflect the emergence of new forms of knowledge, ideas, and practices regarding development, as embodied in new sites of expertise and new directions for resource allocation. The transition between the first two of these agents, well documented elsewhere, resembles to some degree a kind of “routinization of charisma,” to borrow Weber’s formulation: a movement from charismatic statesmen to bureaucratic technocrats. The second transformation—from technocracy to the dominance of finance and from technocrats to financiers—is still unfolding and being understood today. A central claim of this chapter is that this move, however, was not external to the project of the third world, but was in large part a consequence of its trajectory.

Indonesian Notebook: A Sourcebook on Richard Wright and the Bandung Conference

Indonesian Notebook: A Sourcebook on Richard Wright and the Bandung Conference

Co-optation of Third Worldism

Research on the international history of the “Third World” has proliferated since 2005, with the publication of several books adopting a diversity of approaches and methods, focusing on the rhetoric and cultural politics of liberation and de-colonizing movements and providing alternatives to the nation-state framework favored until then. Departing from, but also embracing this scholarship, Jeffrey James Byrne’s Mecca of Revolution: Algeria, Decolonization and the Third World Order offers a conceptually-refreshing narrative that refocuses attention on the statist, regional, and global politics of liberation movements and South-South diplomacy in the mid-twentieth century. Drawing on unprecedented access to Algerian foreign ministry archives, an impressive corpus of primary materials from archives in half a dozen other countries and wider-ranging interviews, Byrne charts the evolution of the “Third World” project from the first Bandung Conference in 1955 to 1965 while focusing on Algeria’s de-colonizing tradition and relevance to the worldwide network of revolutionary and guerrilla movements and the Third World’s Cold War.

Malayanized Chinese-language cinema: on Yi Shui’s Lion City, Black Gold, and film writings

ABSTRACTThis article discusses how the Singaporean Chinese director, Yi Shui, created a Malayanized Chinese-language cinema during the 1950s and 1960s, and offers a retrospective of the way people in Malaya and Singapore framed their nation-building discourse in terms of anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism after the Bandung Conference in 1955. This article holds that the term huayu dianying (Chinese-language cinema) was not first used in the 1990s by scholars in Hong Kong and Taiwan, but that its origins can be traced to Singapore and Malaya in the 1950s where Yi Shui promoted Malayanized Chinese-language cinema in the Nanyang Siang Pau. This earlier use of the term “Chinese-language cinema” overlaps with its current academic usage, including films in Mandarin and Chinese dialects. In 1959, Yi Shui’s essays were collected in On Issues of the Malayanization of Chinese-Language Cinema. Yi Shui also directed several Malayanized Chinese-language films. This article analyzes his “Chinese language cinema” film practice by examining the discourses surrounding the “Malayanization of Chinese-language cinema” in order to show that his semi-documentary Lion City and the melodrama Black Gold attempted to mediate the misunderstandings rooted in the national boundaries and politics of various dialect groups through a “multi-lingual symbiosis” of Chinese languages.

Israel’s Relations with the Anglophone West African States of Nigeria, Ghana, Liberia and Sierra Leone – From Independence to the Present

The Maghreb Review, Vol. 42, 2, 2017 © The Maghreb Review 2017 This publication is printed on FSC Mix paper from responsible sources ISRAEL’S RELATIONS WITH THE ANGLOPHONE WEST AFRICAN STATES OF NIGERIA, GHANA, LIBERIA AND SIERRA LEONE – FROM INDEPENDENCE TO THE PRESENT MICHAEL B. BISHKU* Following its independence in 1948, Israel developed as a ‘garrison state’ seeking out friendly countries outside the West (its prime area of interest) and just beyond the hostile Arab world with which it could cooperate.1 While Israel had some limited success in Asia, it was disappointed in not being invited to the Afro-Asian conference in Bandung, Indonesia in 1955. The outlook on the continent of Africa appeared to be more promising, first with Ethiopia under Emperor Haile Selassie (which joined Israel in the late 1950s and early 1960s in a ‘peripheral alliance’ including Turkey and Iran) and Liberia (which voted for the partition of Palestine in the United Nations in 1947) and continuing with Ghana, which received its independence from Great Britain in 1957 beginning a relatively quick process of decolonisation in Africa; those newly independent countries sought to create (often times from scratch) viable institutions, a situation in which Israel had some experience, though its financial resources were limited. In certain cases, relations with Israel was regarded as a means to distance themselves from the former colonial powers. Before concentrating specifically on Anglophone West Africa, it is best to review briefly Israel’s relations with the non-Arab countries of the African continent in general. Naomi Chazan divides Israel’s relations with those states into five periods: 1) The ‘Honeymoon’ (1956–1973), during which African countries were receptive to close ties with Israel due to the reasons mentioned above, but following the 1967 War, Israel gradually became more closely identified with the West as its occupation of Egyptian lands gave ammunition to Arab arguments that Israel’s actions were ‘imperialist’ in nature; 2) The ‘Emotional Formal Divorce’ (1973– 1982), during which time, in part in reaction to most African countries breaking off diplomatic relations in the midst of and following the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, Israel intensified its relationship with white-ruled South Africa; also, the Palestinian issue began to gain traction on the African continent while, surprisingly, bilateral economic interests persisted and the Israeli ‘defense establishment upgraded its presence on the continent’; 3) A ‘Very Limited and Gradual Formal Renewal of Ties’ (1982–1993), which was largely in reaction to both disillusionment with promises of assistance from the Arab states and a desire to improve relations with the United States. Such would be the case until the end of both the Cold War and of Apartheid in South Africa; 4) A ‘Renewal * Augusta University, Augusta, GA 1 Jacob Abadi, Israel’s Quest for Recognition and Acceptance in Asia (London, 2004), pp. xi– xvii. ISRAEL’S RELATIONS WITH THE ANGLOPHONE WEST AFRICAN STATES 139 or Establishment of Diplomatic Relations’ (1993–2013), during which time these ties were somewhat neglected by Israeli officials who were more concerned with expanding relationships with Asian counties, particularly China, India and new republics of the former Soviet Union, while at the same time, Israeli security firms and businessmen seeking mineral rights concessions took the initiative; and 5) the past few years, during which the countries of Africa have taken on greater political importance due in part to strains in relationships with Western European states preoccupied with instability in the Middle East and eager to bring a settlement to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but also to mutual security concerns regarding the threat of Islamist radical activity. (One might begin this last period earlier than Chazan suggests; that is to say in 2009, with then-Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman’s trip to five African countries including Nigeria and Ghana – in part to counter an Iranian attempt to increase its influence on the continent of Africa.) Chazan concludes that despite Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s continued pronouncements that Israel is ‘coming back to Africa’, it never really left and that the new realpolitik governing Israeli-African relations may … entrench its opportunist securitybased bent…. [Given past history,] Israeli policy-makers have too frequently sacrificed long-term interests to short-term...

Indonesian Notebook Reprised: On Historical Accuracy, Multiple Perspectives, and Alternative Facts

This response corrects some factual errors that were included in a review of the authors' Indonesian Notebook—A Sourcebook on Richard Wright and the Bandung Conference, published in the October 2016 issue of Indonesia (volume 102, pp. 137–40).

Bandung as the call for a better development project: US, British, French and Gold Coast perceptions of the Afro-Asian Conference (1955)

How important international actors such as France, Britain and the United States, viewed the Bandung Conference of 1955 is heavily debated. Furthermore, it remains unclear how the Gold Coast, an emerging power in Africa, perceived the Afro-Asian meeting. This article seeks to illuminate those positions on Bandung through a multi-centric analysis and by reflecting on the importance of Africa for the Afro-Asian agenda. It is argued that, rather than the Cold War, racial solidarity or anti-colonialism, it was development and modernisation that shaped the response of conference observers.

The ‘Bandung spirit’ and solidarist internationalism

ABSTRACTIt must come as no surprise that traces of any continuing relevance of the ‘Bandung spirit’ are enthusiastically being sought in the wake of the sixtieth anniversary of the Asian-African Conference. It was the first high-profile formal conference of newly independent (or ‘about-to-be independent’) post-colonial states at a rather momentous historical conjuncture: the continuing struggles for decolonisation were pronounced in the context of the Cold War. The Final Communiqué of the Bandung conference strongly articulated a collective political project against colonialism and imperialism, and for self-determination and racial equality, while already laying the foundations for the idea of strategic non-alignment in the context of the Cold War. It is in this sense that the Bandung conference has come to be emblematic of an event that inaugurated a radically different international political landscape to the immediate post-1945 world order. In this article, the authors focus specifically on the development aspirations articulated at the Asian-African Conference in Bandung, which they argue are the site of struggles and contradictions. As the authors show, the ‘Bandung spirit’ underlined the political project of Third Worldism, as well as the call for a new international economic order in the 1970s. Yet, they also identify some constraints and contradictions that the ‘Bandung spirit’ had to navigate and the challenges it was up against. In the final part of the article, the authors briefly discuss the extent to which the ‘Bandung spirit’ continues to resonate in contemporary global politics of development.

Beyond Bandung: the 1955 Asian-African Conference and its legacies for international order

ABSTRACTThe special issue this article opens examines the systemic impact, limits, achievements and legacies of the 1955 Asian-African ‘Bandung’ Conference. The Bandung conference is typically celebrated as a high point of Indonesian foreign policy activism and a key milestone in the emergence of the ‘Third World’. By contrast, mainstream international relations has paid comparatively less attention to its broader impact in the evolution of the modern international order. The special issue contributors here seek to correct this lacuna by interrogating Bandung’s significance in challenging, affirming and amending key aspects of the post-war global order. They also consider its relevance in setting important precedents that simultaneously foreclosed and enabled different manifestations of South–South cooperation thereafter. Beyond its historical significance, they finally explore Bandung’s enduring legacies for both domestic Indonesian order-building projects and Indo-Australian efforts to bridge the ‘Bandung divide’ in their responses to contemporary threats to international order. This article opens this inquiry by historically situating Bandung within its broader global context, unpacking its four ‘faces’ (order-challenging, order-affirming, order-building and order-transforming) and finally delineating the key axes of debate around which this special issue is organised.

Studying the Bandung conference from a Global IR perspective

ABSTRACTMainstream international relations scholarship has ignored or disparaged the significance and legacies of the Bandung conference. The author argues in favour of its importance, not only for any serious investigation into the evolution of the post-war international order, but also for the development of Global IR as a truly universal discipline: a global international relations. Few events offer more fertile ground for rethinking the established boundaries of international relations. After introducing the concept of a global international relations, the author then considers ways in which the conference’s key legacies challenge conventional accounts and attest to the ‘agency’ of the newly independent states in the making of the post-war international order. The legacies this section focuses on include frustration at Western attempts to ‘sabotage’ the conference; the delegitimisation of collective defence pacts and the development of the Non-Aligned Movement; the emergence of a South-East Asian regionalism; the strengthening of emergent global norms affirming decolonisation, human rights, universalism and the United Nations; and support for the ‘comity’, over the ‘clash’, of civilisations. The author also canvasses negative legacies of the conference, including the polarisation of Asia and the encouragement of authoritarian tendencies and regional interventionist impulses. The author concludes by drawing implications of the conference for the study of global international relations.