Where was the Afro in Afro-Asian Solidarity? Africa's 'Bandung Moment' in 1950s Asia.

Africans are staged but not often heard in discussions of the "Bandung moment," a high-watermark of decolonial possibility and Afro-Asian connection. This article foregrounds the agency and perspectives of African activists who travelled across Asia in the 1950s. In Delhi, Rangoon, and Bandung, Afri...

Descripción completa

Detalles Bibliográficos
Publicado en:Journal of World History Vol. 30; no. 1/2; pp. 89 - 124
Autor principal: McCann, Gerard
Formato: Artículo
Publicado: University of Hawai'i Jun2019
Acceso en línea:Ver este registro en EBSCOhost
Descripción
Sumario:Africans are staged but not often heard in discussions of the "Bandung moment," a high-watermark of decolonial possibility and Afro-Asian connection. This article foregrounds the agency and perspectives of African activists who travelled across Asia in the 1950s. In Delhi, Rangoon, and Bandung, Africans engaged, co-produced, and made useable the dialogical Afro-Asian world to deconstruct colonialism and engineer alternative futures. The article tracks these dynamics through three interlocked arenas of Afro-Asian affinity: journeys of African students to India from the 1940s; African participation in the Asian Socialist Conference in Burma, 1953–1956, and, as the geographies of Afro-Asianism shifted, radicalized, and splintered, African activism within the Afro-Asian Peoples' Solidarity Organization in Cairo from 1957. It reveals how the overlapping internationalisms of these fora reinforced a dyad of anti-colonial politics and development in the construction of African nationhood and pan-African community. This article breaks new ground in privileging the Afro in Afro-Asian.