The Lives of Cold War Afro-Asianism

The Afro-Asianism of the early Cold War has long remained buried under the narrative of Bandung, homogenising and subverting the different visions of post-colonial worldmaking that co-existed alongside the Bandung project. This book turns the lens on these other visions, and the transnational interactions which emerged from various other gatherings of the 1950s and 1960s that existed beyond the realm of high diplomacy, while blurring the lines between state and non-state projects. It examines how Afro-Asianism was lived by activists, intellectuals, cultural figures, as well as political leaders in building a post-imperial world – particularly women. As a whole, this collection of essays examines the diversity of Afro-Asian ideals that emerged through such movements, untangling the personal relationships, political competition, racial hierarchies, and solidarities that shaped them. By visualising political Afro-Asianism and its proponents as a living network, a fuller picture of decolonization and the Cold War is brought into view.

Carolien Stolte is Senior Lecturer at Leiden University, the Netherlands. Her research focuses on the international history of South Asia. She co-led, with Su-Lin Lewis, the AHRC Research Network ‘Afro-Asian Networks in the Early Cold War’.

Su Lin Lewis is Associate Professor in Modern Global History at the University of Bristol. Her monograph Cities in Motion: Urban Life and Cosmopolitanism in Southeast Asia 1920-1940 was published by Cambridge University Press in 2016. She co-led, with Carolien Stolte, the AHRC Research Network ‘Afro-Asian Networks in the Early Cold War’.

This volume is brimming with original, erudite essays that propel us beyond Bandung proper and into the ‘living networks’ of Afro-Asianism – modeling the same combination of intellectual and political energy that characterized the solidarities of the period 1945-75 itself. Committed to illuminating both cultural geographies and lived experiences that have been overshadowed by state-centric narratives of Cold War geopolitics, the contributors make visible the untold stories of thinkers and doers for a new generation of Global South activists who need as full a history of postcoloniality as possible. Indeed, anyone who is a student of radical visions for the future will need to reckon with what it means to understand Bandung’s affective afterlives as agents of global political change in the context of a rapidly deterritorializing postwar world.
Antoinette Burton,  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

This brilliant collection is at the cutting edge of a new, radically de-parochializing approach to international and transnational history. It is also a model of ethical, engaged, and collaborative scholarship.
Sunil Amrith, Yale University