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This introduction frames the major themes of this book. It begins with a vignette from the Bandung conference that highlights apartheid’s importance to the decolonization project. The introduction then explains the book’s conceptual framework and outlines the motives that drove the major players, before concluding with two arguments relevant to African and American international historians: namely that Africa’s independence fundamentally remade world affairs and America’s approach toward global governance. The book is a history of the postcolonial nation-state—its arrival in the Black Atlantic and impact on the rest of the international community—that uses the debate about South Africa as a political and intellectual microcosm.

This chapter analyzes the utopian fiction of Pauline Hopkins and W. E. B. Du Bois. In response to a long-standing problem with emplacement, both authors use their fiction to manufacture idealized and ahistorical versions of colored empires. Hopkins creates an underground Ethiopian kingdom, while Du Bois uses the force of imagination to link India and the American South into a cohesive but still multiplicitous whole. Hopkins posits utopia not as a unidirectional process of development but a resurrection of an earlier order, while Du Bois strategically employs romance to overcome the limitations of a pragmatic politics of compromise. Their romantic utopianism both responds to Booker T. Washington’s uplift ideology and also participates in a larger philosophy of internationalism emerging in response to colonial rule.

This chapter examines the colonial argument for the claim that human rights are Western. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights has been labelled or at least treated by some as Western on account of it being implicated in some forms of colonialism. Based on a speech by Carlos Romulo — a member of the working group involved in drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights — during the International Conference of African and Asian Nations at Bandung in 1955, it is suggested that the colonial argument is not without substance if one recalls that much of the world's population was not represented in the UN in 1948: large parts of Africa and some Asian countries remained under colonial rule; and the defeated axis powers — Japan, Germany, Italy, and their allies — were excluded as well.

This chapter looks at the Committee on Information's second three-year term from 1953 to 1955, which marks the temporal parameters on its previous term from 1950 to 1952. It examines the presidential administration in Washington that signaled stronger US anti-Soviet rhetoric at the United Nations and a more overt effort to use the Committee on Information for propaganda purposes. It also investigates the Cold War's expansion beyond Europe and the first expression of developing world consciousness in the Bandung Conference that brought colonial questions at the United Nations. The chapter covers the initial stirrings of reformist campaigns and the admission of sixteen new UN member-states, which laid the groundwork for a dramatic expansion in the UN role in the nontrust dependent territories. It mentions the US desire to curry favor with the developing world at a time when the focus of the East–West rivalry was shifting from Europe to Africa and the Middle East.

On 18 January 1955, the PRC upped the ante by recovering the obscure Nationalist-controlled Yijiangshan islands as a prelude to occupying the neighboring Dachen islands. In a news conference on 16 March, Eisenhower publicly threatened the use of nuclear weapons. At the first Afro-Asian Conference held on 18-24 April 1955 in Bandung, Indonesia, PRC premier Zhou Enlai announced that China was not averse to negotiating with the US over the Taiwan Strait. Zhou’s conciliatory gesture was quickly accepted by the US over virulent protests by the ROC. This chapter explores the motivations for the actions of China, the US and Taiwan. It further explicates on the development of Sino-US relations from the eve of the Yijiangshan campaign to the Bandung Conference.

West Java is a diverse Islamic society in which different segments attach contrasting meanings to Islamic communications. Many Muslims are accustomed to listening to preachers when carrying out their routines of piety and celebration. These preachers shape their messages to everyday realities. Other segments problematize routine preaching, arguing that preaching should enable Muslims to transcend their everyday realities. The chapter introduces West Java and its capital city, Bandung, and conveys the multi-faceted Islamic heritage of the region, providing background to the critiques of preaching produced by Muslim elites of the region.

Placing CLR James’s utopian plan for Caribbean federation alongside Indonesia’s self-presentation as an archipelagic state, this chapter illuminates a critical but overlooked element in the history of midcentury decolonization and Caribbean thought: the conceptualization of Caribbean identity and political unity as a relation among islands, outside of the limiting frameworks of nation states and continents and of colonies and Empires. While seldom seen as central to Caribbean literature and thought of the 1950s, James’s work, particularly Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways (1952) articulated this concept more fully. This chapter places James’s thought in relation the Bandung Conference, UN debates on ocean states, and international law. It concludes that James’s vision is important to reintegrate into our understanding of the 1950s because it corroborates scholars’ sense that nationalism on the one hand, and exile and diaspora on the other, are not the only frames within which to understand Caribbean literature.

The introduction shows that two new arguments form the basis of this book: first that international relations theory is incomplete without systematically accounting for the colonialism and its traumatic legacy; and second, a large category of actors, ex-colonies, maintain an emphasis on victimhood and entitlement that dominates their decision calculus today. They have a post-imperial ideology or PII that drives their international behavior.

The second chapter uses statistical analysis to establish the existence of a discourse of victimhood in countries that have experienced colonialism. It uses a new method to analyze speeches from 1993 to 2007 in the United Nations. It shows with statistical significance that there is a difference in the discourse of states that have been colonized and those that have not, and that difference is due to a strong sense of victimhood

Chapter three makes use of previously unused archival documents to look at the 1960 border negotiations between India and China, the last of such negotiations between the two countries before they went to war in 1962. The chapter outlines how the interaction of the three goals of PII led to the failure of the negotiations and, consequently, a border war that still affects relations between the two countries five decades later. It also shows that PII had already emerged as a recognizable and coherent belief system in these two countries in the years just after decolonization.

This chapter examines diaspora as a territorializing practice of foreign policy. It is concerned with understanding the changes in India's diaspora policy, from inclusion during the colonial period, to rejection from 1947–1999, followed by a selective reincorporation from the early 2000s. The chapter first offers a historical summary of the emergence of a globally dispersed Indian nation. It argues that India turned its back on its diaspora on gaining independence to assuage the concerns of its Asian neighbors. By the end of the century, however, India was concerned with bringing elements of its overseas population “home,” in particular, upper-caste and middle-class Hindus. This process of reterritorialization and deterritorialization was driven by contradictions in the definition of the Indian nation exacerbated by domestic social upsurge.

This chapter analyzes struggles over urban space in Bandung, a city of some two-and-a-half million inhabitants. It focuses on a particular piece of land, a strip alongside a now inoperative railway line. As infrastructure, it falls within the ambit of government spatial control. Yet the area has become a settlement for ordinary people through an intricate combination of claims. The selection of this urban setting is not a claim that spontaneous privatization is generalized in Indonesia, in its urban areas, or even in Bandung. Instead, it is an example of how privatization can take place even where one would suppose that government control over space is rather strong. If privatization dynamics nonetheless unfold under the nose of government, these are dynamics worth studying in many other places. The chapter then presents a brief outline of the history of informal, unplanned urban settlement in Java.

This chapter argues that the 1955 Bandung Conference’s anticlimactic impact is most usefully understood in the present as inevitable, yet its normative surplus remains valuable. It describes a collection of conditions that manifest in what it terms ‘Bandung’s fate’: a narrow understanding of Bandung’s legal utility in its immediate present that was in many ways preordained. The chapter argues that pre-1955 discourses in the ‘First World’ created a place for Bandung in its immediate aftermath from which it could not escape, and it draws this understanding primarily from newspaper reporting from major outlets in the First World and contemporaneous reports from Indonesia’s National Archives that detail Indonesia’s understandings of First World perceptions of Bandung. After contrasting these with reports that detail perceptions from the ‘Third World’, the chapter suggests that for the nations that controlled international law, Bandung served preordained purposes that undermined its immediate impact. However, recent scholarship revisiting and revising the story of Bandung, along with renewed interest in what the failure of the NIEO can teach us in the present, indicates that the Conference created a ‘normative surplus’—an unveiling of acceptable norms at a particular point uncodified in law. In specifying elements of Bandung’s ‘normative surplus’ that could be revived, the chapter attempts to recast Bandung not as a story of possibilities lost but a catalyst for new possibilities in the present and future.

Simon Soon’s chapter discusses the development of leftist art discourses in Singapore and Indonesia by examining a selection of manifestos and texts alongside artworks. Close readings unearth oblique references to Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art, which enabled artists to open new ways beyond the autonomy of art in the shadow of the 1955 Bandung conference.

This chapter discusses the epochal meeting of mostly Asian and African nations in Bandung, Indonesia. Bandung was not just a turning point for the world; it was also a turning point for Claude Barnett and his agency. Bandung also signaled the coming era of decolonization and, with Africa surging to independence, Africans could now open government-to-government relations with Washington and there was less of a perceived need for those like Barnett to act as intermediaries and lobbyists. In any case, those like Barnett were coming to be seen not as honest brokers or disinterested politicos but just one more in a long line of entrepreneurs lusting after the vast resources of Africa and the Caribbean. Simultaneously, decolonization also meant that the newly liberated nations could exert pressure on Washington to erode the more egregious aspects of Jim Crow, which helped to foment “integration” that in turn served to erode the rationale for the Associated Negro Press (ANP).

This essay argues that tricontinentalism—the ideology disseminated through the expansive cultural production of the Cold War alliance of liberation movements from Africa, Asia, and Latin America called the Tricontinental—revised a black Atlantic resistant subjectivity into a global vision of subaltern resistance that is resurfacing in contemporary horizontalist concepts, like the Global South. Tricontinentalism responded to a political formulation of blackness from the négritude/negrismo/New Negro movements of the 1920s–40s and to the transformation of this category in Richard Wright’s use of the “color curtain” to describe the 1955 Afro-Asian Bandung Conference. As Bandung solidarity moved into the Americas to become the Tricontinental, tricontinentalism would attempt to push beyond the color curtain, transforming this category of color into a non-essentialist, political signifier that refers to a global and broadly inclusive resistant subjectivity that is inherent to contemporary concepts like the Global South.

This chapter examines how the Eisenhower administration sought to bring stability to a changing world. Global containment remained at the heart of grand strategy, focusing on developments in the Third World. The rise to power of the Shah of Iran and Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam after France’s defeat at Dien Bien Phu in May 1954 bolstered the American Century, yet officials could not ignore the growth of radical nationalism, as represented by Jacobo Árbenz Guzmân in Guatemala, Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt, and nations present at the Bandung Conference in April 1955. Nation-building offered one response through educational programs and religious missions. To guard against revolution, Washington supported counterinsurgency operations in places where radicalism took hold.

This chapter examines selections from Maya Angelou's autobiographies, identifying late-twentieth-century legacy of the post-World War II anticolonial Black Left. On one hand, Angelou's autobiographies contest the historiographic erasure of African Americans' internationalist identifications in the Bandung era, especially as they were animated by Black women. On the other hand, Angelou contributes to this erasure by emphasizing personal triumph and individual identity formation over sociohistorical narrative. Indeed, Angelou's remarkable popularity and cultural capital come at the expense of the revolutionary politics shared with comrades who have been exiled, persecuted, or otherwise banished from public memory. The chapter then considers how her writings and career provide an avenue for reclaiming Black feminism's postwar internationalist routes.