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 existing 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 in 2016. She co-led, with Carolien Stolte, the AHRC Research Network “Afro-Asian Networks in the Early Cold War”. 

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: The Lives of Cold War Afro-Asianism
Su Lin Lewis and Carolien Stolte
2. Here and There, a Story of Women’s Internationalism, 1948-1953
Elisabeth Armstrong
3. Résistantes Against the Colonial Order: Women’s Grassroots Diplomacy during the French War in Vietnam, 1945-1954
Adeline Broussan

Interlude

4. Asian Socialism and the Forgotten Architects of Postcolonial Freedom
Su Lin Lewis
5. Where was the ‘Afro’ in Afro-Asian Solidarity? Africa’s Bandung Moment in 1950s Asia
Gerard McCann
6. Asia as a Third Way? J.C. Kumarappa and the Problem of Development in Asia
Yasser Nasser

Interlude

7. Delhi versus Bandung: Local Anti-Imperialists and the Afro-Asian Stage
Carolien Stolte
8. Building Egypt’s Afro-Asian Hub: Infrastructures of Solidarity in 1950s Cairo
Reem Abou-El-Fadl
9. Soviet “Afro-Asians” in UNESCO: Re-Orienting World History and Humanism
Hanna Jansen
10. A Forgotten Bandung: The Afro-Asian Students Conference and the Call for Decolonisation
Wildan Sena Utama

Interlude

11. Dispatches from Havana: The Cold War, Afro-Asian Solidarities, and Culture Wars in Pakistan
Ali Raza
12. Microphone Revolution: North Korean Cultural Diplomacy During the Liberation of Southern Africa
Tycho van der Hoog
13. Eqbal Ahmad: an Affective Reading of Afro-Asianism
Amza Adam
14. Passports to the Postcolonial World: Space and Mobility in Francisca Fanggidaej’s Afro-Asian Journeys
Taomo Zhou

Epilogue: Afro-Asianism Revisited
Naoko Shimazu

About the Authors
Index