Bandung Conference Research Articles

Marxism and Ukraine’s Struggle for Independence and Self-Determination

Abstract This article traces the historic development of socialist thought on the importance of upholding independence and self-determination for oppressed nations. The examination starts with Marx on independence for Ireland and Lenin’s political and theoretical principals on nations oppressed by the Tsarist dictatorship. It proceeds to Ho Chi Minh’s address to the Comintern, Chou En Lai at the Bandung Conference, and Mao’s writings on contradictions. This article then applies these principals to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, debates in the Left, and the need to support Ukraine.

Nexus between India and Bangladesh in the Liberation War of Bangladesh: Consequences of International Agreement

The support of India and the Soviet Union was very important in the liberation war of Bangladesh, 1971 and the then East Pakistan witnessed a brutal struggle for independence. Amidst the liberation war a triangle web of international alliances and strategic moves attempt to create hegemony in this region. However, it is very urgent to understand the background of why and how India was active, and its attitude was positive in the liberation war of Bangladesh. The present study will investigate these research questions through secondary sources. This present study is qualitative in nature and historical events were explained leveraging the decision making and games theory as theoretical framework. The historic Indo-Soviet Treaty had an immediate impact on the decisive battle between India and Pakistan in the eastern war theater. This paper deals with the explanation for establishing a treaty that was signed between the Soviet Union and India. A focus has been made on the reasons for India's diplomatic role in the liberation war of Bangladesh. This paper also highlights that the friendship treaty between these two countries was not signed to help and aid East Pakistan, but its background prevailed in the 1954 SEATO treaty and aftermath in 1955 Bandung conference that made close friendship ties with USSR and India. Geopolitics, history and international politics played a vital role in signing the treaty that created a nexus between India and Bangladesh during liberation war of Bangladesh.

Understanding South-South Cooperation: A Comparative Analysis with North-South Cooperation Approaches

South-South Cooperation was first conceived at the 1955 Bandung Conference, which led to the foundation of the Non-Aligned Movement in 1961 and other important initiatives within the UN system, such as creating the G77 and elaborating the Buenos Aires Plan of Action. Since the beginning of the century, this cooperation modality has re-emerged and is now considered a catalyst for sustainable development. Given this context, this paper aims to analyze its ideological and political origins, definitions, and evolution, highlighting its importance as an instrument of foreign policy and development cooperation. In addition, a comparison between South-South and North-South Cooperation is made through five dimensions: ideas, institutions/political systems, interests, organizations, and vectors/schemes. Through this comparative approach, the author seeks to present consensual aspects of what is understood as South-South Cooperation and portray the diversity of strategies implemented by countries in the Global South.Keywords: South-South Cooperation; North-South Cooperation; Global South; sustainable developmen; BRICS

Three Concepts of Internationalism in the Global South: Solidarism, Pluralism, and Developmentalism

Throughout modern history, internationalism has been one of the most powerful forces that drives global political changes. While existing research focuses exceptionally on liberal internationalism, studies devoted to internationalism beyond its liberal and Western forms remain relatively scant. Building on a conception that perceives internationalism as a form of human practices, this article explores the evolution of the concept of internationalism in the Global South through a series of political practices from the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 and the 1955 Asian-African Conference in Bandung to the proposal of the New International Economic Order in 1974 and the BRICS’s contestation over NATO’s Libyan intervention in 2011. It is argued that the normative core of internationalism in the Global South is constituted of three major components – pluralism, solidarism, and developmentalism, each in its particular form. Taken together, it envisions an international order rooted in the solidarity of the post-colonial peoples based on their shared colonial past, underpinned by a pluralistic outlook of political life, and places emphasis on redistributive justice in structuring the international economic order. Though some argue that with the rise of the BRICS countries, there will be a revival of Global South internationalism, this article concludes that this is not likely to happen at present.

Language Interconnectedness for Strategic Relations: The Case of Indonesian and Kiswahili

In 1955 Indonesia hosted the Asia-Africa Conference in Bandung whose outcome was the Bandung Spirit whence many countries attained their independence and came together to walk hand-in-glove. Indonesia and Tanzania established diplomatic relations in 1964. The friendship between the two countries is built on a very solid foundation laid down by the founding fathers, the late Soekarno and the late Mwalimu Julius Kambarage Nyerere respectively. The fathers are credited for the promotion of the use of national languages as unifying factors for the otherwise linguistic plural nations. While Nyerere advocated for Kiswahili, Soekarno advocated for Bahasa Indonesia.
 Purpose: The study aims to investigate whether the Arabic language element in the two languages can be exploited to facilitate the two countries’ zest to reach out to each other and in so doing give a credit due to what the respective founding fathers fought for.
 Methodology: To achieve this goal, the researcher controlled for language as a cultural element in diplomatic relations. Kiswahili and Indonesian standard speakers assisted in formulating the compatibility. Dictionaries (English-Indonesian, Indonesian-Arabic, and Kiswahili-Arabic) in their hard and online forms were a source for true and false cognates.
 Findings: The results show that most of the Arabic loan words in the two languages have retained the same meanings as their Arabic origin. There is a strong Arabic language element in the two languages. To that effect, it may not be difficult for an Indonesian to learn Kiswahili as it may also not be difficult for a Tanzanian to learn Indonesian. There are words which are spelt similarly with similar meanings (true cognates), there are words which are spelt similarly with differing meanings (false cognates)-action can be taken to avoid the situation similar to the case of the Tower of Babel depicted in the Bible and there are very true cognates which can be easily recognized through the intonations.
 Unique Contribution to Theory, Practice and Policy: The results of the study are expected to be beneficial for semantic studies in terms of adaptation of loan words, to encourage researchers on Bahasa Indonesia and Kiswahili in lieu of the fact that the latter has gained very much international acclaim and that the two countries have of late expressed strong zest to reach out to each other. Reciprocity in the knowledge of each other’s language shall add impetus to the zeal to reach out.

Beyond the ‘North’-’South’ impasse: self-effacing Japan, emancipatory movements of the Global South and West-Engineered aid architecture

The article has three objectives. The first is to reconsider the popular taken-for-granted categories of ‘Global North’/’Global South’ and ‘Northern’ donors/’Southern’ providers and proposes an alternative account for examining Japan’s role in West-engineered aid architecture. The second is to examine why Japan has constructed a ‘sui generis’ foreign aid model by accommodating both the OECD-DAC and SSC (South-South Cooperation) norms. Finally, this article aims to explain how Japan’s alternative aid modality was possible by highlighting that the academic debate has failed to capture the significance of the emancipatory movements of the Global South epitomized by the 1955 Bandung Conference for Japan’s aid policy.

Preface

Center for Environment and Sustainability Science The recent dominant paradigm of development to some extents have brought “artificial progress” in a number of developing countries, particularly the global south. It has in-fact led to growing income inequality and greater social inequities. It is said so due to it: 1) drowns the nation in the control of global corporations that create acute and sustainable dependence, 2) kills the diversity of specific local products/commodities; dwarfs the abundance of natural resources, internal inputs and local wisdom, 3) put aside indigenous knowledge and technology by metaphors of hegemony and modern innovation, 4) gets rid local actors and nourishes foreign corporations through various investments, which then controls various resources, 5) embed developmentalism that are spread in the sphere of government, bureaucracy, markets, as well as superiority ratio in education and research.An alternative notion is the hope in opposition to this hegemony. A dominant perspective based on various global issues, such as free trade and climate change, must be accompanied by its suitability to be applied at the local level, which is actually rich with diversity, and empirically leading to nation independence and sovereignty. Likewise, optimizing the involvement of various parties (from the government to community) in ensuring sustainability is another prominent issue. On the other hand, the decline in trust in the authorities tends to reduce the level of people’s obedience to various rules, and begins to shift to a way of life that inclusively ignores the rules of the authorities. Hence, where each single party should put themselves? does it need a radical repositioning in order to ensure sustainability?.Therefore, the Center for Environment and Sustainability Science (CESS) Universitas Padjadjaran hold a 5th International Conference on Sustainability Science 2022 “Sustainability Science and Glocalization”. Greening of Industry Network (GIN) The Greening of Industry Network (GIN) is entering its fourth decade of bringing together some of the world’s leading thinkers from academia, industry, government, and civil society. We are an international network of professionals from research, education, business, government and civil society organizations who join together to develop knowledge and transform practice to accelerate progress toward a sustainable society by focusing on issues of industrial development, environment and society, dedicated to building a sustainable future.It is our pleasure to collaborate at this Conference held in Bandung in collaboration with Center for Environment and Sustainability Science (CESS) and the Universitas Padjadjaran (UNPAD).This is the third time we are holding a joint Sustainability Science conference in Bandung with CESS and UNPAD. The Conference on Sustainability Science 2022 is focusing on academic, institutional and societal challenges which explores how alternative local approaches can ensure better sustainability for human life in their interactions globally which is in line with GIN’s mission. The topic of this conference, Sustainability and Glocalization is of utmost relevance to sustainability research and policy. It is also central to GIN’s strategy for its fourth decade. We aim to continue promoting global standards, knowledge, and collaboration for environmental protection while at the same time enabling platforms where partnerships are forged to address ‘wicked problems’ locally. We do this by bringing together scholars from many regions of the world to integrate their experiences with local skills and knowledge, sowing the seeds for the development of context-specific strategies to address the local manifestations of humanity’s great challenges: climate change, biodiversity threats, pollution, inequality and exclusion.Indonesia is central to much of East Asia’s development and increasingly prominent in global supply chains. Indonesia also hosts invaluable ecosystems and biodiversity, natural wonders, cultural treasures and unique historical heritage that must be preserved from the burden that global business models and technologies may inadvertently cause. The papers presented in this proceeding bring together the latest thoughts in a wide range of disciplines addressing global sustainability issues with local impacts. Together they provide a rich tapestry of transdisciplinary strategies and pathways to achieve local goals of environmental protection and social inclusion while at the same time harnessing the benefits of global flows of knowledge, innovation and technology.We wish to thank CESS and Universitas Padjadjaran in hosting this important event. There are many people to thank for making this Conference a reality with dozens of individuals necessary to make up the Advisory, Steering, Organizing, and Scientific Committees.List of Objectives, Theme, Scopes, Speakers and Participants, Conference Program, Committee, s are available in the pdf.

Unfolding Transnational Female Networks: Algeria, Libya, Morocco, and Tunisia’s delegates at the first Afro-Asian Women’s Conference (1961)

Taking its steps from Bandung Conference’s aftermath, the first Afro-Asian Women’s Conference (AAWC) held in Cairo in 1961 contributed to feminizing the Afro-Asian movement. This article focuses on the first AAWC, particularly examining the participation of Moroccan, Algerian, Tunisian, and Libyan delegates. Built on hitherto underexplored primary sources, it constitutes a first contribution in investigating the role of Maghrebi women in Afro-Asian solidarity networks. It highlights that the AAWC marked a significant moment of regional cohesion for Maghrebi women and discloses that Maghreb countries’ delegates voiced their respective countries’ positions on women emancipation. The article also discusses the Maghrebi delegates’ contribution to crafting a shared Afro-Asian women’s political agenda. Ultimately, it retraces the AAWC’s echo in the Maghreb during the following years.

In the name of Asian solidarity: Sino–Japanese competition for technology diplomacy in Burma, 1955–1965

A decade after the 1955 Bandung Conference, China and Japan engaged in a competition for technological exports to Burma. 1 During this process, technocrats in Beijing and Tokyo mobilized non-governmental collaborators—local Chinese industrialists and Japanese businesses seeking overseas expansion—as proxies to maximize their technological output to Burma. The Burmese, on the other hand, used the competition between Beijing and Tokyo as a bargaining tool, and pressed the two regional powers to provide at Rangoon's request. The technical aid Burma received was also affected by its shifting visions for development. Factionalist struggles between 1958 and 1962 changed not only Burma's political landscape but also its leadership's mind-set regarding the economy: the nation moved away from aid-driven industrial modernization towards a self-reliant, agricultural economy based on limited foreign technologies. Consequently, the meaning of the term ‘technological aid’, though used throughout the decade, became flexible and indistinct, carrying vastly different connotations at different stages of the Burmese state-building process. In this way, Burma's experience as an aid-receiving country in Cold War Asia may speak to the flexible power dynamics between the aiding and the aided countries, and shed light on the diversified means through which states employed science and technology as diplomatic tools in Cold War competition.

Isolating the Enemy: Diplomatic Strategy in China and the United States, 1953–1956

Isolating the Enemy is a valuable addition to continuing historical debates about Sino-American relations in the 1950s and beyond. It conclusively resolves persistent questions, weighs in on others, and opens the door for new avenues of inquiry. Drawing on newly available Chinese, Russian, and Vietnamese government materials, Tao Wang shows that from 1953 to 1956, Beijing and Washington each pursued a “wedge strategy” meant “to eliminate the other's threat through uniting allies and mobilizing supporters to push the other to make concessions” (pp. 3, 7). Each sought to isolate the other from natural allies, and both understood what their opponent was up to. These opposing wedge strategies generated a mix of confrontation and conciliation in U.S. and Chinese diplomacy, confounding contemporaries and entrenching mutual suspicions. The book is organized around three major events: the Geneva Conference on Indochina (April–July 1954), the first Taiwan Strait crisis (September 1954–May 1955), and the Bandung Conference (April 1955). Wang suggests that China's leaders generally got the better of their American counterparts in all three of these high-stakes encounters. Effectively shaming the United States for trying to derail the Geneva Conference, Chinese premier Zhou Enlai and head of state Mao Zedong skillfully concluded complex bargains with leaders in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Russia, Britain, and France. In contrast, President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles found themselves caught between “the unattainable and the unacceptable” because they ignored conciliatory overtures, exaggerated Chinese ambitions, underestimated tensions between China and Vietnam, and overestimated Sino-Soviet differences (p. 61). Ultimately,

UN Resolution 1514: the creation of a new post-colonial sovereignty

What role did the post-colonial world play in shaping the contemporary norm of sovereignty? Challenging the traditional understanding of the development of sovereignty as a norm that expanded from Europe, this article recentres the post-colonial contribution to the development of sovereignty. This article first presents the Western powers’ understanding of the norms of sovereign recognition in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, before outlining the post-colonial states’ efforts to develop new norms in favour of equal sovereignty for the post-colonial world. It does this first by analysing the contribution of the post-colonial world in the shaping of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and how these normative documents were taken up by the post-colonial world to argue for an end of colonial rule. It then provides a history of the normative ideas developed in the post-colonial world in the 1950s, expressed at the Bandung conference (1955) before being normalised into our contemporary understanding of international sovereignty through the passage of United Nations Resolution 1514: The Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples in 1960. This work addresses the radical disjunctures and enduring continuations between ideas of sovereignty in the colonial and post-colonial eras of international relations.

Socialist Yugoslavia and the Non-Aligned Movement: Social, Cultural, Political, and Economic Imaginaries ed. by Paul Stubbs (review)

Reviewed by: Socialist Yugoslavia and the Non-Aligned Movement: Social, Cultural, Political, and Economic Imaginaries ed. by Paul Stubbs Helena Stolnik Trenkić Stubbs, Paul (ed). Socialist Yugoslavia and the Non-Aligned Movement: Social, Cultural, Political, and Economic Imaginaries. Montreal, QC and Kingston, ON, London and Chicago, IL 2023. xiv + 393 pp. Illustrations. Tables. Notes. Index. $120.00: £92.00. This edited volume, the product of fourteen papers presented at a workshop in February 2021, is a multifaceted addition to scholarship which has seen burgeoning interest in recent years: European socialist internationalism, and particularly Yugoslav non-alignment. Its focus on 'imaginaries' forefronts the lived experience of non-alignment, assessing the patchwork impacts of the policy in multiple spheres. The book's best contributions explore tensions between non-alignment's theoretical character and its actualities. Peter Willetts, for example, seeks to dismantle the 'myth' that non-alignment grew out of the 1955 Bandung Conference. Reminding readers of the falsity of post hoc, ergo propter hoc ('after this, therefore because of this'), he outlines the irreconcilable differences of Bandung's conservatism and non-alignment's radicalism. While Bandung avoided the topic of decolonization and based its grouping on territoriality, Tito and Nasser's non-alignment rejected bicontinentalism for a common ideological approach stressing sovereignty and anti-colonialism. Willetts reminds us of the multiplicity within visions of worldmaking that are often conflated into one heritage — but leaves the reader wanting more detail on how the myth arose, the actors involved, or their motivations. Yugoslavia's relationship with Latin America, often overlooked, is wonderfully covered by Agustin Cosovschi as a competition between ideals and geopolitical necessity. Chilean socialists seeking a model between the US and USSR approached Yugoslav representatives in the early 1950s. Yugoslavia prioritized a subtle form of engagement, establishing formal ties to Chile's Popular Socialist Party not via the leadership, but through the socio-political organization Socialist Alliance of Working People of Yugoslavia. By the end of [End Page 183] the 1950s, the Alliance had activities across Latin America. Yet the high-stakes, radicalized atmosphere of the 1960s obscured Yugoslavia's 'light brand' (p. 288) of non-alignment. Latin American countries, seeking to counter increased US pressure, turned to Cuba and the USSR for more forceful support. The 'justice of [non-alignment's] ideals' (p. 298) had value, but was unsustainable given practical considerations. Ljiljana Kolečnik nuances scholarship on cultural diplomacy and Yugoslav art exchanges with the Global South by analysing the content of resulting exhibitions. The Commission for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries seemingly preferred presenting the ancient cultures or folklore heritage of non-aligned countries. For example, Egypt's request to 'showcase its post-colonial identity using contemporary art' was successfully replaced by a display of Egyptian ceramics (p. 188) — despite the Yugoslav public's interest in modernism. Kolešnik suggests that the Commission had inadequate information about contemporary cultural developments in non-aligned countries, or was influenced by the political thinking that Third World countries should root their post-colonial societies in their traditional practices. My own research suggests that some curators emphasized historical arts to counteract the presentation of former colonies as primitive or culture-less. But it also seems that the Commission also prioritized traditional works for their 'exotic' nature (p. 187). The chapter would have been further elevated with comparative analysis of the contemporary art that the Commission did allow — including contemporary Libyan (1966) and Tunisian (1969) art exhibitions. While space does not permit detailed discussion of the other papers, some overall themes emerge, such as the recognition of non-alignment's emotional value as a vision of an alternative world. In the contemporary context, where half the globe's population has no memory of the Cold War, true geopolitical alternatives are difficult for young historians to conceptualize. Borrowing from sociology or anthropology to appreciate the emotional valence of internationalisms is vital for studying worldmaking projects. The varied research techniques on show make the book useful to postgraduates planning their own research projects. Of note are the chapters (Mila Turaljić, Leonora Dugnjic-Rodwin and Ivica Mladenović, Bojana Videkanić) that use the life-course of individuals as historical data. These, in addition to Ljubica Spaskovska...

1950년대 중립주의의 발흥과 남·북한의 반응

Examined in this article is how both South and North Koreas perceived and responded to the concept of Neutralism, which emerged all around the globe after the Korean War. Analyzed in particular is rather ‘symmetrical responses’ displayed by both South and North Korean governments, to global events that occurred in the wake of such ideology emerging in the 1950s, such as the Bandung Conference in 1955, Austria’s Neutralization and Unification during the same year, the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, and the drafting of the first version of the Yugoslav Communist Alliance Code in 1958.BR Research shows that both South and North Korean governments responded rather symmetrically toward the Asian and African regions where Neutralism prevailed(as we can see from the Bandung Conference), the Free World(as in the case of Austria), and the Communist realm(as in cases of Hungary and Yugoslavia), during the Cold War of the 1950s. Their such responses varied, depending on whether they could benefit from the effects of supporting neutrality.BR Previous studies of the Cold War History, either from Korean scholars or from scholars abroad, have concentrated on the relations between ‘Central regions,’ or relations between regions which were rather ‘Central’ while the other was mostly categorized ‘Peripheral.’ Attempted in this work conversely is to define and determine the relationship between regions that could both be considered as ‘Peripheries.’ It should be noted that South and North Koreas have together formed one of the last front-lines of the Cold War on the Korean peninsula which has always been perceived as a ‘Peripheral region,’ and that other countries which declared Neutralism in the hope of escaping clutches of the polarizing nature of the Cold War order were also such peripheries.

DARI MESIR HINGGA ALJAZAIR: JALAN PANJANG DIPLOMASI INDONESIA MENUJU KONFERENSI ASIA AFRIKA KEDUA (1955-1965)dua (1955-1965)

This research discusses Indonesian diplomatic role in pursuing the implementation of the Second Asian-African Conference (AAC) in 1965 in Algeria. This study is motivated by the limited historiography highlighting Indonesian central role in encouraging the implementation of the second conference. In fact, organizing the conference was one of the Indonesian Government efforts to repeat the success of the first Asian-African Conference in Bandung in 1955. The national political interests were also the reason behind this diplomatic effort. This research used historical method with archive, magazine, and newspaper as sources. This study aims to analyze the Government’s efforts, challenges, and the social and political conditions. The results show that Indonesia had initiated and prepared the second conference for almost a decade (1955-1965). The venue had even changed for several times: from Egypt to Algeria. Despite a long diplomatic process, this conference was canceled due to the unfavorable regional and international political situation. The novelty of this study is Indonesian diplomatic patterns and actions towards the implementation of the Second AAC, such as personal diplomacy efforts, political safaris, and diplomatic meetings.

Third World Crossings

The Bandung Conference of 1955 is often described as the beginning of what Vijay Prashad called the “Third World” project. While it is undeniable that intergovernmental gatherings had largely facilitated the political connections between Chinese and African leaders, no less significant in cultivating a heightened Bandung Spirit in the decolonizing world were the “transnational networks” such as the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Conference (1957), the Afro-Asian Writers’ Conference (1958), the Afro-Asian Women’s Conference (1961) and the Afro-Asian Journalists’ Association (1963). These platforms allowed a privileged group of writers to travel to Africa. Feng Zhidan, Du Xuan and Han Beiping were among them. Their travel notes, later published as 西非八国漫记 (Glimpses into West Africa, 1962), 西非日记 (West Africa Diary, 1964) and 非洲夜会 (Nights in Africa, 1964), carefully described local landscapes, climate and architecture, as well as their personal encounters with Africans from diverse social backgrounds outside the state apparatus. Likewise, a Malian minister and writer, Mamadou Gologo, recounted his tours in China and his deep appreciation for the country. China: A Great People, A Great Destiny (La Chine, un peuple géant, un grand destin) was published in both English and French by New World Press in Beijing in 1965. Like an X on a map, crossing marks both a place and a process, an intersection and a journey. This essay aims to explore the multi-dimensional “crossings” of individuals, texts and circulation networks that went beyond national boundaries and the Cold War binary. It argues that travelogues, as both under-explored archives and literary writings, help to reveal the tangible nature of Afro-Asian solidarity, felt through individual encounters and sometimes fragile emotional bonds.

On history and authority: the Cold War nuclear arms race and its importance for critical security theory

ABSTRACT Since the late 1990s, the critical study of security has crystallised into a professional field of study – Critical Security Studies (CSS) – complete with theoretical schools, journals, and disciplinary narratives that recount its birth and development. The establishment of CSS as a separate field of inquiry distinct from conventional approaches to security is a remarkable achievement but has also come at a price. We argue that this is especially apparent in relation to the limited role Cold War history plays in CSS. Disciplinary narratives of the field tend to conflate the Cold War period with conventional security theory or strategic studies, thus downplaying the originality and importance of critical perspectives articulated during this protracted conflict. Emphasising the deep entanglements of the Cold War nuclear arms race with questions of ecological contamination, democracy, race, and decolonisation, we argue that these intersections are worth revisiting as intellectual precursors and foundations for CSS. We briefly illustrate this argument by highlighting important challenges to conventional security thinking that were formulated at three interconnected sites during the early Cold War: the 1955 Bandung Conference, Pan-African resistance to French nuclear testing in Algeria, and African-American anti-nuclear activism.

In search of the “voice of the people”: Mahmoud Darwish’s third-worldist genres

ABSTRACT In the years following the Bandung Conference of 1955, poetry that captured the “voice of the people” became a strategy of the project of Third-Worldism. Mahmoud Darwish (b. 1941, Birwah, d. 2008, Houston) was one of the poet-intellectuals who identified his poetry with this strategy, and with the importance of putting the Palestinian “voice” in conversation with other struggles. Though understood as a national poet of Palestine, reading his 1964 Awrāq al-Zaytūn (Olive Leaves) in the parallel context of Third-Worldism helps to understand the role of poetic genre in this era’s debates about popular language, and sheds light on the transnational commonalities of post-Bandung anticolonial poetry. Analysis focuses on two poetic genres that Darwish adopted in the early 1960s—genres designed to capture this voice of the people. Reading his work in this light gives insight into hitherto unexplored facets of modern Arabic metapoetry, and why the dramatization of speech became the primary mode through which the “voice” of the Palestinian people could be captured.

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

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.

Triangulating Africa: Contemporary art as a terrain for creating China–Africa connections

Colonization and race are important issues influencing international contemporary art practice, but related discourse is often focused with Europe or America at one end of a binary dialogue opposing the peripheries and former colonies. Since mid-twentieth century, following the independence of new nation states and events such as the 1955 Bandung Conference, there has been an increasing awareness to create new axes of sociopolitical connections. China–Africa relations evolve from this context but remains a topic mostly studied from state-level politics and economics. Recently, artists from the Greater Chinese context have started investigating ways of understanding Africa culturally through their artworks. Pu Yingwei (mainland China), Musquiqui Chihying (Taiwan) and Enoch Cheng (HK) are three young artists whose recent works focus on creating more intimate narratives to construct an understanding of China–Africa relations. China is introduced in the dichotomous mode of discourse, and this new triangulated focus expand the understanding of China–Africa relations by offering more nuanced perspectives.

Author Response

Author Response